The precondition feature is underrated

[Mache_Nor]

More and more people post their experience with it, and thus I might as well share mine. Context: Europe trip with average temperature of 4C / 39F. Norway - Poland. Various networks.

First session (Kildeparken) it only barely preconditioned as I forgot to add charger in NAV. Rest are preconditioned. I have never had such speeds in freezing temperatures before. Therefor: do as Jesus, precondition!

Sponsored

 

[bshaw]

Ford should build a button into the car UI that will warm the battery and then show the current HVB temp when pressed.
It’s a little complicated though because in colder temps, you have to switch off the cabin temp to make any real progress on battery heating and I think most people would rather keep their cabin warm.

 

[Vulnox]

Not sure it's underrated, more that it's more of a pain than it should be. We precondition every morning using departure times which has great benefit, I can see the difference in consumption every time my wife drives to work between precondition and not.

But when I was on a longer trip and needed a DCFC stop most recently, I tried to use the nav based preconditioning, but the Ford nav kept trying to take me on an alternate route and wouldn't offer the route I was taking. I finally got it to take me to the DCFC I was aiming for once I was within about 30 miles of them and thought I was set. I was also using Apple Maps through CarPlay in addition to the car nav because that's what I had been using.

After about 20 minutes I went to check the Ford Nav and my route was just gone. I don't know if it has a bug where it cancels it because of the Apple Maps nav or what. While I know they don't really "talk" as far as 3rd party nav and Ford's, I suspect it had an issue because both tried to display on the instrument cluster and the Ford nav may have bugged out. It did it to me twice, so I just gave up. The car still charged at 140-160kW for a while, but this was in June so it was warm.

I don't know if we will ever see a button because most MME owners likely don't understand the function and if they activate it all the time it would just ruin their range. I hope we eventually see the charger on route precondition work with 3rd party nav.

 

[bshaw]

You can only have 1 navigation destination going at the same time, which makes sense. You don't want two sets of turn-by-turn / speaking happening at the same time.
Use your preferred 3rd party Nav until about 20-miles out from the DCFC. Then, search for the DCFC using Ford Nav and setting that destination will cancel your 3rd party Nav destination. Let Ford Nav guide you the rest of the way to gain battery temperature before you arrive.

 

[21st Century Pony]

Agree with all of the above. I've found parallel advantages to using preconditioning. I also habitually use home, other L2 or DC Fast "shore power" to heat the cabin while charging when temps are cold.

OP, nice post.

 

[silverelan]

These sessions are on the ER pack? What model year is your MME?

 

[Thunderbuck]

Preconditioning is crucial, and as much as I love my MME a major pet peeve is the lack of ways to activate it. Ford "dumbed-down" the user experience on this car, and I get why (they expected to attract a bunch of EV newb as customers), but I really wish they had a "hard mode" on this car that includes things like better access to preconditioning.

 

[Mache_Nor]

To answer the question about car: Extended range RWD, 21’ job 2.

Now, how to navigate with the NAV? Let’s be honest with each others, it’s sucks as much as being at the power plant Chernobyl when shit hit the fan. It just ain’t workable, sorry. So what you must do is to FIRST find your suitable navigation program (Google Maps, ABRP, Apple Maps etc.) and plot in the location you want to go to, THEN you address-add the destination in the native NAV followed by whatever close by charger (click charge icon when plotting the route to get close by chargers) to have the benefit of a function NAV and precondition. It’s not pretty (having to ignore cluster panel and use CarPlay / Android Auto exclusively), but it gets the job done.

Sponsored