Pics and notes - Mach E at Tuttle Click Capistrano Ford - SoCal

1pt21Gigawatts

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I think the wiper fluid is readily accessible in the frunk - see the picture - its on the right side as you open the frunk (blue lid). I assume its easy to fill as well. I assumed it is the wiper fluid cap and the shape of the plastic container underneath too. Can see a few inches of the container at least when the frunk is open.


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Did anyone check where the 12V is in there and if it’s actually something you could replace yourself easily at 10pm in the dark with cold fingers on a frozen highway? Know that BEVs kill
Their 12V’s like no tomorrow
 

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ouch..,. but Sirius has low bitrate. I wonder how sound is on higher quality source..
Yes agreed. I get to sit in the car again at my local dealer. I need to check that with a higher quality source. I also do not know how the system was adjusted for sound before I checked it. Could have had bass turned up all the way or any number of things.

Question - what is the best source to check the car audio system?
 

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ouch..,. but Sirius has low bitrate. I wonder how sound is on higher quality source..
Good to know! My salesperson turned on a Sirius channel yesterday and raised the volume fairly high. I thought it sounded terrible. Mostly bass and the high range was quite muffled.

We were inside a building though, so not sure how good satellite reception would be. Also some doors were open, I didn't check audio settings, and I didn't know Sirius sucked.

Yes agreed. I get to sit in the car again at my local dealer. I need to check that with a higher quality source. I also do not know how the system was adjusted for sound before I checked it. Could have had bass turned up all the way or any number of things.

Question - what is the best source to check the car audio system?
If you've got high bit rate MP3s on a USB thumb drive you could try listening to that.

The important thing is to test sources that you actually care about. For me, I mostly listen to podcasts with FM or Pandora on very rare occasion. So that's what I'd want to test out for myself.
 


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Question - what is the best source to check the car audio system?
flash drive with 320 bitrate mp3 or similar high end format
basically anything other than sirius.. Spotify will be about 160 bitrate unless premium subscription is activated. Betrter than sirius, but not high def.

I am really hoping this thing sounds decent when adjusted right. I'm coming out of a Bowers & Wilkins car system, and that is a pretty high bar. Hope I'm not too disappointed.
 
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We were inside a building though, so not sure how good satellite reception would be.
SiriusXM is a digital signal rather than analog, thus it's all-or-nothing. The audio doesn't degrade on a weak signal, it just cuts out completely.

Some people don't think SiriusXM sound quality is very good, but I don't find it to be bad. Maybe a little tinny but not much. There's always road noise present too, so audio in a moving car is never going to be ideal.
 
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Did anyone check where the 12V is in there and if it’s actually something you could replace yourself easily at 10pm in the dark with cold fingers on a frozen highway? Know that BEVs kill
Their 12V’s like no tomorrow
This is something that concerns me as well and need to check into. As @ChasingCoral posted , it seems to a challenge to get to - and a tow is what may be needed to a dealer or shop to replace.

When you say BEVs kill 12V's - what do you think the frequency might be. I dont have any previous experience with BEVs. Recently my kid's ICE battery died in a parking lot and my kid called AAA and got battery replaced - I dont think it would be this easy with the 12V battery. It would be nice if we could buy some spares and just pop one in when it fails but from what I am reading its unlikely that it would be that easy.
 

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Did anyone check where the 12V is in there and if it’s actually something you could replace yourself easily at 10pm in the dark with cold fingers on a frozen highway? Know that BEVs kill
Their 12V’s like no tomorrow
My son and I have a collective 14.5 years driving Leafs and Bolt. Neither of us has ever had an issue with the 12V battery. Are there some data that suggest a problem with 12V batteries in EVs?
 

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Did anyone check where the 12V is in there and if it’s actually something you could replace yourself easily at 10pm in the dark with cold fingers on a frozen highway? Know that BEVs kill
Their 12V’s like no tomorrow
I'm not sure why the 12v battery wouldn't last twice or three times that of ICE. No crank events.
 

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SiriusXM is a digital signal rather than analog, thus it's all-or-nothing. The audio doesn't degrade on a weak signal, it just cuts out completely.

Some people don't think SiriusXM sound quality is very good, but I don't find it to be bad. Maybe a little tinny but not much. There's always road noise present too, so audio in a moving car is never going to be ideal.
Before Sirius and XM merged, XM sound quality was noticeably better. After the merger, for a while, there were still two sets of channels. The night the channel lineups merged, for the most part the Sirius ones won (one notable exception was the main children's channel - Kids Place Live). The argument was that there was a lot of overlap, but the XM ones had real station managers while the Sirius ones were radio-style computerized playlists. You could see that with Lucy vs. Lithium - Lucy had (for example) XM Saturday Night, which was awesome and I still miss, while Lithium... doesn't. All the station managers pretty much got let go all at once.

Anyway that history lesson gets me to the main point, which is that the station bandwidth on Sirius was lower than XM - the music is noticeably more compressed as part of that. It's hard to tell somewhat if you just hear it in a vacuum, as it were, but compared to less compressed music, it's noticeable.

Generally, I find it fine for in-car music, and even for smart speaker music as home (it used to be streaming was locked behind higher-level subscriptions, but a little while after SXM bought Pandora, that changed, so now pretty much everyone gets streaming). But, compared to the USB stick I have plugged in to my Fusion with mostly lossless CD rips, or the rare time I use a CD, it's very noticeable.

Oh, and the talk channels are REALLY compressed. Sometimes they can border on unlistenable, to me at least.
 

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My son and I have a collective 14.5 years driving Leafs and Bolt. Neither of us has ever had an issue with the 12V battery. Are there some data that suggest a problem with 12V batteries in EVs?
3 years in and the 12v in our Leaf is fine.
 

1pt21Gigawatts

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This is something that concerns me as well and need to check into. As @ChasingCoral posted , it seems to a challenge to get to - and a tow is what may be needed to a dealer or shop to replace.

When you say BEVs kill 12V's - what do you think the frequency might be. I dont have any previous experience with BEVs. Recently my kid's ICE battery died in a parking lot and my kid called AAA and got battery replaced - I dont think it would be this easy with the 12V battery. It would be nice if we could buy some spares and just pop one in when it fails but from what I am reading its unlikely that it would be that easy.
Tesla is pretty infamous for killing 12V’s all the time, it’s a lot of draw on them I guess. Maybe it’s just them or maybe they have more things running with all their screens and modems and cameras and such.

https://forums.tesla.com/discussion/81007/12v-battery
 
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SiriusXM is a digital signal rather than analog, thus it's all-or-nothing. The audio doesn't degrade on a weak signal, it just cuts out completely.

Some people don't think SiriusXM sound quality is very good, but I don't find it to be bad. Maybe a little tinny but not much. There's always road noise present too, so audio in a moving car is never going to be ideal.
The OTA channels in SiriusXM have pretty low bandwidth.

The Mach-E is supposed to support SiriusXM's 360L. This basically combines satellite and streaming--when it can it will use the in-car's cellular to stream the audio instead of pulling it down via satellite. It is noticably better quality when using streaming (uses a much higher bitrate if available).
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