GTPE: 422 mile road trip (one way) trip report (Long)

[four0four]

Hello all,

Figured I'd put this together with my experience of a 400 mile road trip from the SF Bay Area to Los Angeles.

Trip date: Sunday 11/21
Departure time: 10AM
Arrival time: 7:46PM

Total miles driven: 422.5
2 adults & a 7 Yo. and luggage to last a month (no, we are not staying that long). Not packed to the brim, but a pretty full car with a few things in the frunk also, nothing super heavy.

Starting battery charge %: 100 (GOM: 244 miles, reset the EV driving profile the day before.)

---

First leg: Home to Pinoche Shell, Fireburg, CA (80 to 580 to I-5)
145 Miles (2.5 hours of travel time)
Remaining battery @ arrival: 32% (78 mi)
Fast charge from 32% - 80% (202 mi on the GOM) (30 mins)

Notes:
Drove mostly between 65 - 80MPH in whisper mode and BlueCruise.
(except for 5ish miles that I was in Unbridled mode, catching up and hanging out with a really sweet, heavily modded late 60's mustang). He didn't really play and I was not doing anything to goad him on but he was traveling at 80 - 90MPH at one point.
More traffic than I expected for a Sunday.
Some climbing, but nothing major outside of the Altamont pass getting out of the Bay Area.

4 of the 6 chargers seemed to be out of service. Thankfully no one else was there so I was able to find one that worked.

Fordpass and the EA app / NFC (Apple wallet payment) did not work on either of the units. SO I ended up having to use my CC to charge. After a 25 min hold time to get through to EA, they told me that they will refund the difference is price per kw. They of course said, oh you should have called us to remote start to which I said, sure, but I was not about to wait 25 mins on hold to get that sorted.

----

Second leg: Pinoche Shell to Country Side Mart, Bakersfield. 2.5 miles off I-5.
121.4 miles (2 hours of travel time.)
Remaining battery charge @ arrival: 29% (72 mi)
Fast charge from 29% - 80% (204 mi) (32 mins)

Notes:
Majority of travel was on BlueCruise around 80MPH.
I did have one burst of acceleration (less than 10 seconds form 70 - to ... whee) to pass a major bottleneck of traffic in the left lane.

EA charging station was much busier but the information on the APP was correct. There was one available charger @ 150KW.
Fordpass did not work, but the EA app did, this time around.

This was the last charge before I climbed Tejon pass. This charging station was around 55 miles from Grapevine, CA which is the start of the climb.

According to the navigation app, I would have been able to make it to my destination with 10% batter left, but there isnt a lot of local charging options so I made a decision to stop in Van Nuys which was around 95 miles. Mostly so I wasn't going to stress myself out over the % after the descent / ascent. Those details are below.

----

Third leg: Bakersfield to Van Nuys. (I-5 to a bunch of other freeways)
94.8 miles (1:45 hours travel time - a lot of this was rush hour traffic)
Remaining battery charge at arrival: 39% (97 mi)
Fast charge from 39% - 80% (201 mi) (28 mins)


Notes:
I guess I ended up being stressed for no reason. The 38.5 mile ascent / descent ate up 16% of the battery. I was mostly on BlueCruise at 70mph the whole time. I'll have to check on the actual elevation gain/loss but its about a 2000ft climb to to Tejon pass and then a bunch of rolling hills until the descent to caustic which is at 1266ft.

The EA station was at a Target, 3 of the 4 occupied.
Fordpass worked on the first try, for the first time ever. It seemed like this was a newer station, not sure if it had anything to do with it.

----

Last leg:
Van Nuys to the Torrance area. (118 to I-5 to 170 to 101 to 110 I think.)
58 miles (1:30 hours) Mostly rush hour, things cleared up a bit on the 110 past downtown LA.
Remaining battery charge at arrival: 56% (140 mi)

---

Overall, it was not as bad as I anticipated, although 9 hours is a long time with a 7 year old. In contrast, driving the SUV, we'd probably have made it in around 6.5ish hours. It was definitely long, but I have to be honest, with BlueCruise most of the way I was actually not as tired as I usually am.

The return trip will be shorted because ... well I'll probably be slightly more aggressive with my driving and only charge twice If I can since I can get back home with low battery % and not worry about it.


BlueCruise observations: (No I didn't read the manual, so fair warning to skip this part if you are compelled to tell me that I should have to avoid these issues.) ?

• Took way too long for me to realize that I can turn off the speed limit recognition option.
• BC does not engage past 80mph. Maybe it was in the manual...
• When BC engages, it definitely pulls to the right, it was pretty evident after changing lanes and took me a minute to get used to that. It did get uncomfortable close to a big rig once at which point I had to shift it back because it made me nervous.
• It had some issues recognizing lanes that had a black rectangle frame around the white lines. Generally these are a result of construction when there are lane reconfigurations and then shifted back to the original lane markers.
• it would be great to get another second or two to deal with climate control etc., on the main screen before getting yelled at to keep my eyes on the road.
• overall, its great, I love it on long stretches of road and after a while I felt like I knew the it was going to ask me to resume control and I already had my hands on the wheel before it reminded me.

Sync4/Wireless CarPlay:

• it's been working fairly well over the past few weeks but about half way through the trip things stated to go a little haywire.
• The main trip navigation cancelled itself, not really sure why. It could have been connection issues or that I was looking for EA stations on my phone vs the CarPlay UI, for some reason the CarPlay UI would not pull up the fav stations I had saved.
• The trip navigation cancelled itself 2 more since after that, but I was not even touching the phone either time.
• Wireless CarPlay just disconnected itself no less than 5 times during this time.
• The nail in the coffin was when both CarPlay and sync navigation went in to crazy mode and all the buttons on the sync navigation went away except for the expand button on the top left. I was in the middle of navigating to the end of the trip from the EA station and the only thing that was responding was the nav on the screen in front of me. CarPlay would not connect and I couldn't even change the radio station, the whole interface started responding really really slow and I decided to just leave it alone and not mess with it while I was driving and at the end of the long trip. Which is part of the reason I don't remember off hand which freeways I had to take to get to the final destination. It definitely felt like something was happening between the two.
• Everything seems to be back to normal now so I'm really not sure what happened, will have to see if the same issue persists on the way back home.

Not a whole lot of interaction with folks at the charging stations except for chit chatting about EA charging issues. Only saw a few ID4's, an ETRON, Volvo XC40 and a Hyundai Kona.

Did not see a single Mach-E of any kind during most of the drive (during daylight hours)

I don't have anything negative to report about handling, acceleration or lack there of with the car as loaded as it was. Simply did not notice any difference and although I was somewhat conservative in my driving the car did what I wanted it to when I wanted it to. Absolutely no complaints there.

Lastly, I was definitely concerned about how comfortable these seats were going to be for this type of drive, coming from road tripping in a Mercedes SUV and the F150 which is like a traveling couch, we thought that the seats were great, they offered good support not uncomfortable at all. Especially for a trip that was 9 hours.

Hope this helps, happy to do a condensed report for the trip back if anyone is interested.

EDIT: Temps were around 60 when we left the Bay Area, generally stayed that way most of the trip. The Grapevine area was in the mid-high 50's and LA was in the mid 60's.

Absolutely no complaints on the glass roof either, especially from the 7 year old vampire who hates the sun coming via the sunroof in the other vehicles we have.

EDIT 2: I was going to do a return trip report, but it took 11.5 hours because of a crazy truck fire in the grapevine and thanksgiving traffic and I was pretty annoyed by the time we got back to do anything.

Good news is that we did make it on 2 stops. EA stations were a lot busier, had to wait for a charger at one of them, but plug and charge worked flawlessly both times and the time to 80% was pretty similar to the trip down.

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[DevSecOps]

Nice review. I was wondering what Tejon Pass would be like and to be honest I was kinda worried about going over it. I was going to go from Sacramento to Palm Desert a couple weeks back, but it got cancelled. I assumed that a usual 6 hour drive would be 9 as well, so basically you confirmed that.

I did a review of BC about 2 months ago. I also noticed that BC wouldn't work above 80mph which I find very frustrating. I80 in Nevada, as one example, has an 80mph speed limit, which means keeping up with the flow would require non-BC driving which I find unacceptable.

Wondering what you thought of BC on some of the I5 expansion joints. I had a few where the car would ping-pong around a bit, outside of my comfort zone. This happened more frequently at higher speeds vs lower speeds. I also had a few areas of I5 that would randomly disengage. I specifically remember some going up and over small hills about 20 miles north of Santa Nella.

Thanks again for the detailed post!

 

[JohnF]

I believe that there is something with Apple that doesn't like Sync. I have not had any problems with my Android Auto app.

 

[four0four]

Nice review. I was wondering what Tejon Pass would be like and to be honest I was kinda worried about going over it. I was going to go from Sacramento to Palm Desert a couple weeks back, but it got cancelled. I assumed that a usual 6 hour drive would be 9 as well, so basically you confirmed that.

I did a review of BC about 2 months ago. I also noticed that BC wouldn't work above 80mph which I find very frustrating. I80 in Nevada, as one example, has an 80mph speed limit, which means keeping up with the flow would require non-BC driving which I find unacceptable.

Wondering what you thought of BC on some of the I5 expansion joints. I had a few where the car would ping-pong around a bit, outside of my comfort zone. This happened more frequently at higher speeds vs lower speeds. I also had a few areas of I5 that would randomly disengage. I specifically remember some going up and over small hills about 20 miles north of Santa Nella.

Thanks again for the detailed post!

Thanks!

There was a bit too much traffic on I-5 for BC to stay fully engaged as much as wanted because I was changing lanes a bit, but the pull to the right was definitely something I had to get used to. It was a little confused along the areas where there was construction and restripesd. It may be in the Santa Nella area actually, and further down past Kettleman City that it was doing the drunken drifting thing at which point I just took over.

In contrast, BC seemed to be fine in heavy traffic - still moving at close to the speed limit through the Bay Area and LA area, but there are many long curves so there was a bit of engaging / disengaging going on. I generally stayed in the left lane for the most part. It's definitely a bit more nerve-racking at high speeds in the middle lanes.

I went in to it with low expectations given the reviews and it being my first experience with something of this type so it was definitely not as bad and they have a lot to work out, but it's better than just adaptive cruise control that I have in my SUV, IMO.

 

[tgcrun]

Thanks for the write up. At some point I want to start taking some longer trips from Pasadena, and it's helpful to know that it's not impossible.

 

[mac123]

I took my first road trip from the Bay Area down to LA, after taking delivery of my GT a month or so back. The positive things I liked about the drive was the ride and blue cruise. Blue cruise worked beautifully for me the entire trip down on I-5 and worked as well as tesla’s autopilot for me. (I’ve had Teslas as my primary car since 2014, prior to switching over to the GT.

the first leg of the trip from the Bay Area to Coalinga, CA (Harris Ranch chargers), ford’s navigation system and the estimate that it provided for range were fairly accurate. I charged at the Harris ranch electrify America charger to 90% upon which the ford navigation system said that I’ll make it all the way to my hotel in Universal City, LA without needing to make another charging stop, but ABRP said I needed to make another stop. I decided to go with what ford navigation said (based on the confidence from the first leg of the trip) and it nearly stranded me. it looks like the ford navigation system didn’t factor in the elevation gain of nearly 4200 ft and the steep ascend of tejon pass as I neared LA. My estimated range dropped off a clip, the navigation system automatically added a fast charging stop at Santa Clarita. A few minutes later, it estimated that I won’t make it to Santa Clarita. It was a nerve wracking drive, and I drove on the right lane and slowed to under 50 mph speed. Long story short I finally made it to the Santa Clarita electrify America charger with 4% charge remaining. The regenerative braking from the descent from the top of tejon pass to Santa Clarita saved the day for me.

On the return trip I decided to play it safe, stopped at the Santa Clarita EA charged topped off to 80% before navigating Tejon Pass, and then made it to the Harris Ranch EA chargers with 21% charge remaining where I charged to 90% and made it home to the East Bay.

 

[four0four]

I took my first road trip from the Bay Area down to LA, after taking delivery of my GT a month or so back. The positive things I liked about the drive was the ride and blue cruise. Blue cruise worked beautifully for me the entire trip down on I-5 and worked as well as tesla’s autopilot for me. (I’ve had Teslas as my primary car since 2014, prior to switching over to the GT.

the first leg of the trip from the Bay Area to Coalinga, CA (Harris Ranch chargers), ford’s navigation system and the estimate that it provided for range were fairly accurate. I charged at the Harris ranch electrify America charger to 90% upon which the ford navigation system said that I’ll make it all the way to my hotel in Universal City, LA without needing to make another charging stop, but ABRP said I needed to make another stop. I decided to go with what ford navigation said (based on the confidence from the first leg of the trip) and it nearly stranded me. it looks like the ford navigation system didn’t factor in the elevation gain of nearly 4200 ft and the steep ascend of tejon pass as I neared LA. My estimated range dropped off a clip, the navigation system automatically added a fast charging stop at Santa Clarita. A few minutes later, it estimated that I won’t make it to Santa Clarita. It was a nerve wracking drive, and I drove on the right lane and slowed to under 50 mph speed. Long story short I finally made it to the Santa Clarita electrify America charger with 4% charge remaining. The regenerative braking from the descent from the top of tejon pass to Santa Clarita saved the day for me.

On the return trip I decided to play it safe, stopped at the Santa Clarita EA charged topped off to 80% before navigating Tejon Pass, and then made it to the Harris Ranch EA chargers with 21% charge remaining where I charged to 90% and made it home to the East Bay.

Yikes! Glad you made it! at 4% I think I'd probably would have had a full blown panic attack.

Since I was waiting so long for the GT, I was watching long range trip you tube videos for a bit and all of those definitely called out that the nav does not take the climbs in to account which is why I was over prepared to have enough of a charge to get up and down the pass.

Our next trip may be to southern Oregon and I'm going to see how the I-5 ascent from the Redding area to Ashland, Oregon work out. Hopefully there will be EA charging available in the mountains since I think its a way steeper climb, but also a pretty significant descent so maybe re-gen breaking will return a bit of that energy.

 

[Larry Paul]

Great report-super helpful. One ask- what was/has been you average miles per kW?

 

[Jim Glass]

Hello all,

Figured I'd put this together with my experience of a 400 mile road trip from the SF Bay Area to Los Angeles.

Trip date: Sunday 11/21
Departure time: 10AM
Arrival time: 7:46PM

Total miles driven: 422.5
2 adults & a 7 Yo. and luggage to last a month (no, we are not staying that long). Not packed to the brim, but a pretty full car with a few things in the frunk also, nothing super heavy.

Starting battery charge %: 100 (GOM: 244 miles, reset the EV driving profile the day before.)

---

First leg: Home to Pinoche Shell, Fireburg, CA (80 to 580 to I-5)
145 Miles (2.5 hours of travel time)
Remaining battery @ arrival: 32% (78 mi)
Fast charge from 32% - 80% (202 mi on the GOM) (30 mins)

Notes:
Drove mostly between 65 - 80MPH in whisper mode and BlueCruise.
(except for 5ish miles that I was in Unbridled mode, catching up and hanging out with a really sweet, heavily modded late 60's mustang). He didn't really play and I was not doing anything to goad him on but he was traveling at 80 - 90MPH at one point.
More traffic than I expected for a Sunday.
Some climbing, but nothing major outside of the Altamont pass getting out of the Bay Area.

4 of the 6 chargers seemed to be out of service. Thankfully no one else was there so I was able to find one that worked.

Fordpass and the EA app / NFC (Apple wallet payment) did not work on either of the units. SO I ended up having to use my CC to charge. After a 25 min hold time to get through to EA, they told me that they will refund the difference is price per kw. They of course said, oh you should have called us to remote start to which I said, sure, but I was not about to wait 25 mins on hold to get that sorted.

----

Second leg: Pinoche Shell to Country Side Mart, Bakersfield. 2.5 miles off I-5.
121.4 miles (2 hours of travel time.)
Remaining battery charge @ arrival: 29% (72 mi)
Fast charge from 29% - 80% (204 mi) (32 mins)

Notes:
Majority of travel was on BlueCruise around 80MPH.
I did have one burst of acceleration (less than 10 seconds form 70 - to ... whee) to pass a major bottleneck of traffic in the left lane.

EA charging station was much busier but the information on the APP was correct. There was one available charger @ 150KW.
Fordpass did not work, but the EA app did, this time around.

This was the last charge before I climbed Tejon pass. This charging station was around 55 miles from Grapevine, CA which is the start of the climb.

According to the navigation app, I would have been able to make it to my destination with 10% batter left, but there isnt a lot of local charging options so I made a decision to stop in Van Nuys which was around 95 miles. Mostly so I wasn't going to stress myself out over the % after the descent / ascent. Those details are below.

----

Third leg: Bakersfield to Van Nuys. (I-5 to a bunch of other freeways)
94.8 miles (1:45 hours travel time - a lot of this was rush hour traffic)
Remaining battery charge at arrival: 39% (97 mi)
Fast charge from 39% - 80% (201 mi) (28 mins)


Notes:
I guess I ended up being stressed for no reason. The 38.5 mile ascent / descent ate up 16% of the battery. I was mostly on BlueCruise at 70mph the whole time. I'll have to check on the actual elevation gain/loss but its about a 2000ft climb to to Tejon pass and then a bunch of rolling hills until the descent to caustic which is at 1266ft.

The EA station was at a Target, 3 of the 4 occupied.
Fordpass worked on the first try, for the first time ever. It seemed like this was a newer station, not sure if it had anything to do with it.

----

Last leg:
Van Nuys to the Torrance area. (118 to I-5 to 170 to 101 to 110 I think.)
58 miles (1:30 hours) Mostly rush hour, things cleared up a bit on the 110 past downtown LA.
Remaining battery charge at arrival: 56% (140 mi)

---

Overall, it was not as bad as I anticipated, although 9 hours is a long time with a 7 year old. In contrast, driving the SUV, we'd probably have made it in around 6.5ish hours. It was definitely long, but I have to be honest, with BlueCruise most of the way I was actually not as tired as I usually am.

The return trip will be shorted because ... well I'll probably be slightly more aggressive with my driving and only charge twice If I can since I can get back home with low battery % and not worry about it.


BlueCruise observations: (No I didn't read the manual, so fair warning to skip this part if you are compelled to tell me that I should have to avoid these issues.) ?

• Took way too long for me to realize that I can turn off the speed limit recognition option.
• BC does not engage past 80mph. Maybe it was in the manual...
• When BC engages, it definitely pulls to the right, it was pretty evident after changing lanes and took me a minute to get used to that. It did get uncomfortable close to a big rig once at which point I had to shift it back because it made me nervous.
• It had some issues recognizing lanes that had a black rectangle frame around the white lines. Generally these are a result of construction when there are lane reconfigurations and then shifted back to the original lane markers.
• it would be great to get another second or two to deal with climate control etc., on the main screen before getting yelled at to keep my eyes on the road.
• overall, its great, I love it on long stretches of road and after a while I felt like I knew the it was going to ask me to resume control and I already had my hands on the wheel before it reminded me.

Sync4/Wireless CarPlay:

• it's been working fairly well over the past few weeks but about half way through the trip things stated to go a little haywire.
• The main trip navigation cancelled itself, not really sure why. It could have been connection issues or that I was looking for EA stations on my phone vs the CarPlay UI, for some reason the CarPlay UI would not pull up the fav stations I had saved.
• The trip navigation cancelled itself 2 more since after that, but I was not even touching the phone either time.
• Wireless CarPlay just disconnected itself no less than 5 times during this time.
• The nail in the coffin was when both CarPlay and sync navigation went in to crazy mode and all the buttons on the sync navigation went away except for the expand button on the top left. I was in the middle of navigating to the end of the trip from the EA station and the only thing that was responding was the nav on the screen in front of me. CarPlay would not connect and I couldn't even change the radio station, the whole interface started responding really really slow and I decided to just leave it alone and not mess with it while I was driving and at the end of the long trip. Which is part of the reason I don't remember off hand which freeways I had to take to get to the final destination. It definitely felt like something was happening between the two.
• Everything seems to be back to normal now so I'm really not sure what happened, will have to see if the same issue persists on the way back home.

Not a whole lot of interaction with folks at the charging stations except for chit chatting about EA charging issues. Only saw a few ID4's, an ETRON, Volvo XC40 and a Hyundai Kona.

Did not see a single Mach-E of any kind during most of the drive (during daylight hours)

I don't have anything negative to report about handling, acceleration or lack there of with the car as loaded as it was. Simply did not notice any difference and although I was somewhat conservative in my driving the car did what I wanted it to when I wanted it to. Absolutely no complaints there.

Lastly, I was definitely concerned about how comfortable these seats were going to be for this type of drive, coming from road tripping in a Mercedes SUV and the F150 which is like a traveling couch, we thought that the seats were great, they offered good support not uncomfortable at all. Especially for a trip that was 9 hours.

Hope this helps, happy to do a condensed report for the trip back if anyone is interested.

EDIT: Temps were around 60 when we left the Bay Area, generally stayed that way most of the trip. The Grapevine area was in the mid-high 50's and LA was in the mid 60's.

Absolutely no complaints on the glass roof either, especially from the 7 year old vampire who hates the sun coming via the sunroof in the other vehicles we have.

EDIT 2: I was going to do a return trip report, but it took 11.5 hours because of a crazy truck fire in the grapevine and thanksgiving traffic and I was pretty annoyed by the time we got back to do anything.

Good news is that we did make it on 2 stops. EA stations were a lot busier, had to wait for a charger at one of them, but plug and charge worked flawlessly both times and the time to 80% was pretty similar to the trip down.

BC only works on specific, programmed limited access highways. Unfortunately, Ford doesn't have a way to tell you if you are on one of them but the car knows. There may have been times when you were just in the intelligent CC function and not BC?

 

[four0four]

Great report-super helpful. One ask- what was/has been you average miles per kW?

I will check and report back on this when I get the car back from the dealer. It's been there for almost a month now to get the bumper and grill replaced. (Unless there is a way to get this info via the app, which I cannot find.)

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