Wrong Battery Pack?

[SpacePony]

I think it's worth your time to verify the battery pack size. Yes, the range is an estimate, but my estimate is nearly 100 miles more than yours, and we have the same vehicle. It doesn't sound that far fetched for a brand new model vehicle to have a mixup in the options on the assembly line, especially one that cannot be easily verified by visual inspection. If it were me, for my own peace of mind, I would verify the 88kwh battery pack.

I agree, sounds like my only option might be to convince a Ford dealer to do it for me though?

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[SpacePony]

Very simple answer: don't rely on the guess-o-meter! It doesn't know where you plan to go or the conditions it needs to calculate the actual range it can go. It will always be highly conservative.

Get in the car, turn on navigation, and pick a spot 200 miles away. See if it will navigate you there without charging. How much range will it have when you get there? If it can't get there without charging try shorter distances like 175 miles and 150 miles.

Now try with someplace 225 miles away, then 250, then 275, then 300. This will tell you the range the car predicts when it knows the distance, likely speed, altitude changes, and weather conditions of your drive.

You can do the same thing with your normal driving. Charge up and drive it for a while. How far do you go before charging and how much range does it think is left?

Don't trust the GOM for anything other than a low-ball estimate. Then be glad Ford chose to do it this way. I've hopped in my Leaf trusting the GOM would get me somewhere, only to learn the GOM was based on slow around town driving and my battery won't get me where I need to go on my planned 70 mph interstate drive. I'd rather start out with a conservative GOM than a wildly optimistic one!

I guess I don’t know another way to say this: I know not to trust the GOM, nor do I care what it say other than the fact that it only seems to be backing up my suspicion, and is the only gauge on the vehicle that provides any information that I’d need to calculate it.

Also, I do plan to make a longer trip, but I have a job and family, it’s not easy to just take multiple day trips and run up my mileage, just to try and calculate and answer if it was possible the answer was “oh yeah, here’s this engineering screen that tells you that info.”

Which is why I asked.

I appreciate everyone’s info and responses, but apparently the answer is “there’s no real way of knowing without doing a bunch of tests” Or “ask a Ford engineer to check it.”

So, I got an answer, it just wasn’t the answer I was hoping to hear!

 

[ChasingCoral]

I guess I don’t know another way to say this: I know not to trust the GOM, nor do I care what it say other than the fact that it only seems to be backing up my suspicion, and is the only gauge on the vehicle that provides any information that I’d need to calculate it.

Also, I do plan to make a longer trip, but I have a job and family, it’s not easy to just take multiple day trips and run up my mileage, just to try and calculate and answer if it was possible the answer was “oh yeah, here’s this engineering screen that tells you that info.”

Which is why I asked.

I appreciate everyone’s info and responses, but apparently the answer is “there’s no real way of knowing without doing a bunch of tests” Or “ask a Ford engineer to check it.”

How far do you drive in a day? Don't recharge until you get low and you'll get your answer during normal driving.

 

[SpacePony]

I guess I don’t know another way to say this: I know not to trust the GOM, nor do I care what it say other than the fact that it only seems to be backing up my suspicion, and is the only gauge on the vehicle that provides any information that I’d need to calculate it.

Also, I do plan to make a longer trip, but I have a job and family, it’s not easy to just take multiple day trips and run up my mileage, just to try and calculate and answer if it was possible the answer was “oh yeah, here’s this engineering screen that tells you that info.”

Which is why I asked.

I appreciate everyone’s info and responses, but apparently the answer is “there’s no real way of knowing without doing a bunch of tests.”

How far do you drive in a day? Don't recharge until you get low and you'll get your answer during normal driving.

Sometimes 3, sometimes 53. I already skip many days until it needs at least 10% charge. (I’d wait until below 50% on my Volt)

it doesn’t help that at least half of my charging log entries look like this:

 

[RyZt]

My Mach E4X shows 191 miles at 80%. Based on my actual road trip experiences, my car's actual range is at least 10% better than ABRP's estimate of Mach E ER AWD even though I drive 10-15mph above speed limit. (I've used 450+ kWh of EA credit from Ford, and I only use EA charger on road trips.)

Your Mach E shows a number higher than mine. You really don't need to worry about this. Mach E's GOM is just very conservative.

 

[SpacePony]

Ok, so that screenshot gave me realize I have enough info to do some calculatin'. My Charger is 15amps (on a NEMA 6-20 socket), which should charge at 3.6 kW, with a battery intake of 3.2 kW on the Mach-E4x according to this site. So 4.8 hrs at 3.2 kW ≈ 15.86 kWhr. App says 16% charge, so 15.86kWhr/0.16 ≈ 99kWhr.

I know Ford doesn't base their percentage on the total 99kWhr pack, only the 88kWhr usable portion, but either way, that seems to suggest that I don't have the 68kWhr pack.

I guess I'm just crazy and my car really does think it's cold and I'm a "fun" driver. Or at least that'll ease my mind until I actually get a single long road trip under my belt where I can do some more math. Fun! Go Math!

Thanks again for everyone responses.

 

[louibluey]

Oh, which brings up a secondary question. In the FordPass charging log, does anyone know if the “energy” it reports is kWh from the wall, or kWh into the pack?

(aside, I actually need to drop the rear belly pan, because a tab is out; maybe there is a label somewhere on the side of the battery. Do folks drop that pan for the rear hitch install? Are there any battery labels on the battery pack back there?)

So, here is as close as I can get with an anecdotal example - On April 24 I got home needing 48% charge to get back to 80%. FordPass says I took on 42.24 kW-hr over 4 hours 20 minutes. My chargepoint flex is 11 kW. So, that would mean about 47.6 kW-hr dispensed. Chargepoint App says I dispensed 46.358 kW-hr (I think it actually runs at ~10.7 kW with MME which is 46.3 kW-hr). At least for this single example, it seems that FordPass might be reporting actual energy received either at MME charger input, or to the battery itself after some losses. Here are the various screens, including my whole home monitor, which may have some additional info (TBD, it includes all home loads in the graph):

So, this method seems to work okay - 48% of 88 kW-hr is about 42 KW-hr,
and 48% of 68 kW-hr is about 32 kW-hr (so I do not have the smaller 68 kW-hr battery )

 

[EagleDave]

...
I appreciate everyone’s info and responses, but apparently the answer is “there’s no real way of knowing without doing a bunch of tests” Or “ask a Ford engineer to check it.”

Wild idea... Maybe you have access to a scale and can weigh your MME? A smaller battery pack would mean a lighter GVWR. Your Premium ER/AWD says : GVWR at 2631 KG (5800 LB):

You would have to find someone with a Premium SR/AWD to see what their GVWR is, and decide if the difference would be measurable on a truck scale.

I use the scale at my local retail rock quarry...

 

[ChasingCoral]

Sometimes 3, sometimes 53. I already skip many days until it needs at least 10% charge. (I’d wait until below 50% on my Volt)

it doesn’t help that at least half of my charging log entries look like this:

When trying to get to the bottom of this, don’t rely on the Mach E’s trip or charging logs. Write down each trip and charge.

 

[jeffdawgfan]

So, I’ve been frustrated by the low range estimate on my Mach-E4X. It’s been way off since I bought it, but because everyone says that it adjusts over time and takes a while, I’ve been patient. But I’m growing weary. Here’s where I am at:

I bought it with 17 miles and reset the driving history and trip meters at around 50. That reset the GOM to about 210 miles. I’ve now put over 1,000 miles on it, and my trip meter says I’ve averaged 3.5 mi/kWhr over those 1000 miles. BUT the highest extrapolated range I’ve ever seen is 245 miles.

if I believe Ford’s EPA estimate on the AWD with 68kWhr standard pack, you’d need to get about 3.1 mi/kWhr to hit 210 miles, and an average of 3.5 mi/kWhr is 238 miles, which is suspiciously close to the figure my car has been reporting all along, and nowhere near the 308 it should be getting if I really did use 88 kWhr at an average of 3.5.

I know everyone says it takes a while to “learn,” but over how long? If 1,000 miles isn’t enough, what is?

So is it possible my car either has the wrong battery pack installed, or is misconfigured to believe it does? Is there any way to check what the vehicle reports it has for the pack or total capacity?

We have the AWD EX range also. Our estimate has never read greater than 258 miles and we also average around 3.4 miles/kwh. I usually just ignore the range estimate and watch %charge.

 

[Murse-In-Airy]

If you go to the details of a current charging session, FordPass will show total kWh added so far. The battery logs do not. But a current charge session will. (At least on iOS)

 

[SpacePony]

When trying to get to the bottom of this, don’t rely on the Mach E’s trip or charging logs. Write down each trip and charge.

Wouldn’t it be great to see this somewhere: Total
kW used on a trip. Both the i3 and the Volt did this. I don’t know why Ford chose to hide so much of this info.

 

[ARK]

I know OP said they are now satisfied that they do in fact have the correct, larger battery pack, but I would add for anyone else with this concern, the battery pack itself couldn’t simply be swapped out, the wiring is different.

For example, as I understand it, the SR and ER models all have the same motors, but the amount of energy the ER batteries can discharge is what leads to the higher horsepower figures on the ER variants. And it’s not simply the battery size, the wiring is different to the motors in order to accommodate this.

So even if it ever got so far that the wrong battery was inserted into a vehicle that was being built, if it were even possible to get that far, the rest of the equipment would simply not be correct, the puzzle pieces would probably not fit so to speak, and even if they did, I bet the vehicle would show all sorts of faults across the line the moment it was turned on by having an equipment mismatch.

 

[SpacePony]

I know OP said they are now satisfied that they do in fact have the correct, larger battery pack, but I would add for anyone else with this concern, the battery pack itself couldn’t simply be swapped out, the wiring is different.

For example, as I understand it, the SR and ER models all have the same motors, but the amount of energy the ER batteries can discharge is what leads to the higher horsepower figures on the ER variants. And it’s not simply the battery size, the wiring is different to the motors in order to accommodate this.

So even if it ever got so far that the wrong battery was inserted into a vehicle that was being built, if it were even possible to get that far, the rest of the equipment would simply not be correct, the puzzle pieces would probably not fit so to speak, and even if they did, I bet the vehicle would show all sorts of faults across the line the moment it was turned on by having an equipment mismatch.

Huh, well I didn’t know that, I just guess I thought the only difference was 3 layers of batteries or 4. Good to know!

 

[shutterbug]

frustrating the Ford app charging log only goes by “miles added”, and doesn’t give the starting and ending percentages

It doesn't??? Mine does:

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