larryh

I finally had the PowerMax 30A / 18' 240 V charger installed today along with a timer. The charger is a very nice unit. Mr. Electric was here from 9:30 AM until 5:30 pm doing the installation. The service panel is in the basement, so he had to go through about 35' of floor joists to get to the garage and then another 30' to the charger. I also had a meter socket installed to take advantage of the power company's lower rates at $0.0585 / kWh. I still need to contact the power company to have the new meter installed. The total installation cost was $1550. The peak hour rates from the power company is $0.3785 / kWh. So I don't want to be charging during peak hours. Unfortunately, Value Charge consumes 60 Watts of power waiting to charge. In addition, if the battery is depleted, the car battery will be charged to 10% immediately and then charging will continue during off peak hours. At $.03785 / kWh, Value Charge would be costing me more than not subscribing to the power company's special rate program for EVs. So I opted to use a timer instead.

That's great news. It sure took a long time to diagnose the problem--but the car does have a lot of high tech. It was a such a simple repair.

Yes, I would be disappointed too. Unfortunately, from the experiences of others, it seems that diagnosing the cause of the problem can be difficult. There are so many components that draw power from the battery. There is a lot of high tech in the car. Hopefully, the dealer will quickly be able to identify the source of the problem for you. I monitor the charge on my battery. But that is mostly because I want to understand how the car works and how best to optimize its operation.

I get the same dealer-installed update available message when I log into synchmyride. Others have reported that when they contacted the dealer, the update was not applicable to their car. You should be able to provide your VIN and the dealer will tell you if it is needed. I wonder if some of the modules in your car need to be reset if they are doing strange things. They might not have been shutting down properly causing a power drain on the battery. Or they could be malfunctioning because the battery voltage was too low.

During regen, the plug-in energy displayed on the car's console decreases and the MPGe that it displays increases (and, of course, it takes less plug-in energy to recharge the car which will be observed on the Kill-A-Watt meter). So the charts shown do take regen into account. I have been continuing to update the plot above. The factor is currently 1.3899.

Are you sure the ICE did not come on? I believe it comes on, but it does not use any fuel when used for braking.

I purchased the 7 year/75,000 mile ESP with $200 deductible from Anderson & Koch for $900. They are about 15 miles from my home. Note that the ESP is the same price for all Fusion models. So the Energi owners are getting a bargain relative to the gasoline powered fusions since the car costs almost twice as much and has a lot more components. The vehicle requires very little maintenance, so I don't see any point in a maintenance plan. This plan would be better suited for a vehicle that requires high maintenance.

For hybrid mode, there is no correction to apply to get true MPGe. That only applies if plug-in energy was used to power the car. If you do not exceed 55 mph, it is expected that you will get 50+ MPGe in hybrid mode.

Acceleration also uses a lot of power from the battery too. As power increases the relative advantage in efficiency of the electric motor over the ICE decreases. I would let the ICE do the hard work and reserve EV mode for low power operation.

The car should detect anomalous readings and record them for later diagnosis. The car tracks 100's of DTC faults via the OBD II system, which I think you can read via Engineering Test Mode. A high battery temperature would be a very important fault to record.

Monitor the EV info screen in the car when you get home to make sure the next GO time is correct, the value charge profile name is Home2, value charge is enabled, and the next charge time is as expected. It should select the value charge profile to use based on current location.

If the HVB is fully charged, the car cannot use regen to slow the car. It has to use the ICE instead. Wait until the HVB is discharged a few percent before using L.

Stoplights have a significant negative impact on mileage. It is unlikely that 96% of the kinetic energy can be captured and used to restore the lost kinetic energy stopping for a stoplight. My best estimate of energy lost due to aerodynamic drag and friction going from 60 mph to 0 mph in 30 seconds is 0.05 kWh (based on the plots I have provided of MPGe vs speed in EV mode). If I included that, I would also get around 96% efficiency. But my measurements are not all that accurate to begin with. And if you looked at MPGe for stopping at several stop lights vs. not stopping for any stop lights along the same route, I think you would see a significant difference.

The kinetic energy of the car going 60 mph is about 0.185 kWh. 2.3% of the battery energy is about 2.3%*5.6 kWh = 0.128 kWh. So the amount of energy restored to the battery is approximately 70%. An accurate measurement is difficult since the EV info screen displays % charge of the battery to the nearest percent. It would be better if it were to the nearest tenth of a percent for a more accurate measurement.

If you would like to monitor the 12 V battery, you could purchase an inexpensive Battery Monitor that plugs into the power points in the car. To measure the charge in the battery, you should wait several minutes for everything to shut down and the battery to stabilize before taking the voltage reading from the battery monitor. After everything has shut down, you will notice that the voltage increases very slowly for the next half hour or so. So I would wait at least 20 minutes after turning off the car and closing the doors before reading the voltage. Note the power points shut off after a limited amount of time, so you will have to push the start button on the car twice to turn it on and then off so you can read the monitor. You then have to wait for the voltage to stabilize. You should arrange the monitor so you can see the measurement from outside the car without opening the doors, since opening the doors turns on several systems which uses power from the battery and will yield incorrect readings on the monitor. If something is drawing current from the battery, the battery monitor will register less than a full charge voltage of 12.6 V. If the battery is charging (the car is on or the HVB is charging), the monitor will register a value greater than 13 Volts. A fully charged battery will have a voltage reading from 12.6 to 12.85 V, when no current is being drawn from the battery. In the morning, after charging the HVB overnight, I have measured the charge on the battery to be 12.62 V. So if the battery voltage is not around 12.6 V in the morning, something is wrong. If the car has sat a day, I would expect the battery charge to be around 12.5 V or better. It the car has sat two days, I would expect it to be 12.35 V or better.

I did an informal experiment this afternoon. I accelerated to 60 mph and observed that about 5.2% of full battery charge was used to do this. Most of the time it took 5%, but occaisionally it took 6%. To get better measurements, the EV info screen would have to show charge to more accuracy than 1%. With the car in L, I then measured the amount of charge recovered by regen going from 60 mph to 0 mph. That was about 2.3% of full battery charge. Most times it was 2%, but sometimes it was 3%. Assuming it takes about 40 seconds to get to 60 mph and another 40 seconds to get back to 0, the average speed for the trip is 30 mph and the distance travelled is about 0.67 miles. To go 0.67 miles at 30 mph requires about 1.8% of full battery charge. So my very rough calculations indicate that 2.3/(5.2 - 1.8) = 68% of the kinetic energy is recovered. There is a very large margin of error in these calculations.

I just tried setting a GO time with the 120 Volt charger. The AC turned on 15 minutes before the GO time. The Kill A Watt meter initially showed 10 watts of power. After about 3 minutes, it increased to 1.3 kW. At the GO time the AC shut off and the charger continued to draw 1.3 kW of power until the HVB was fully recharged. I would guess that the heater and AC get their power directly from the HVB. After preconditioning has drawn down the HVB charge a little, the car then begins to charge the HVB. The energy from the charger does not appear to go directly to the heater or the AC. That might explain why the car never draws more than 3.3 kW from a 240 Volt charger for preconditioning no matter how much power the charger supports. The power from the charger is only used to charge the HVB and not to directly power the heater or AC.

You recover about 75% of the kinetic energy from regen when slowing down. Unless you intentionally want to slow down, regen wastes energy. When using L, you are not able to coast due to the aggressive regen. To maximize efficiency when using L, only let off on the gas pedal when you intentially want to slow down for a stop sign or something. Otherwise, you should keep the foot on the pedal and try to minimize regen. If you driving in D, you don't have to be as careful with trying to prevent unintentional regen since it is much less aggressive and coasting is possible.

In order for GO times to work, the car must wake up temporarily to determine what to do. Your result would imply that the car wakes about one hour prior to the GO time to figure out when it needs to start the AC to precondition the car. If it doesn't need to start the AC at the moment, I would expect it to go back to sleep and and wake up again at a later time. If at this later time, it determines it needs to start the AC, it will do so. Otherwise, it would go to sleep again and wake up at a still later time prior to the GO time and check again, and so on.

I thought for cabin conditioning, the car turns on climate control 15 minutes before the GO time. 1.3 kW is the maximum power the car can draw using the 120 V charger. 1 hour of running AC at 1.3 kW is excessive. It does not require that much energy to cool down the car. I would not expect it to take an hour. It is probably not using that much power the entire time. You should check the amount of energy on the meter at the time conditioning starts and when you unplug the car.

I'm not sure that you are in hybrid mode for the entire inbound commute when using EV later. The car needs to deplete the battery to 95% of full charge before it can begin EV later operation. It might be more accurate to deplete the battery on the inbound commute and record hybrid mileage on the return trip.

Also, it appears the EPA only tested the Fusion Hybrid and used those results for the C-MAX hybrid: Ford is changing the way it generates the miles-per-gallon label for C-MAX Hybrid going forward. Previously – and consistent with EPA’s General Label rules – testing of the Fusion Hybrid was used to generate fuel economy labels for a family of vehicles, including both Fusion Hybrid and C-MAX Hybrid. The result was the same fuel economy label values for both vehicles. While the company could continue to use EPA’s General Label for C-MAX Hybrid, Ford voluntarily has decided to test and label C-MAX Hybrid separately going forward. The result will be a lower miles-per-gallon label for the 2013 C-MAX Hybrid. Testing to generate a label for the 2014 C-MAX Hybrid is not yet complete. The revised 2013 Ford C-MAX Hybrid label will carry a class-leading EPA combined fuel economy value of 43 mpg – topping the combined label value of 42 mpg for the Toyota Prius v. And, yes, they tested the C-Max Energi and used those results for the Fusion Energi. So the C-MAX hybrid has too high of ratings and the Fusion Energi too low.

You can see a MPG vs speed chart for the Prius and C-MAX hybrids here: http://cmaxchat.com/?p=1675. The Fusion Hybrid should be similar to the C-MAX Hybrid.

Monitoring the energy consumption used by climate in hot weather, I observe for the first five minutes AC uses about 5 kW to cool down the passenger cabin, and then about 0.5 kW thereafter to keep it cool. So the initial cool-down takes about (5/60) hrs * 5 kW = 0.42 kWh. Then if your one-way commute is 25 minutes, it will consume another (20/60) hrs * 0.5 kW = 0.17 kWh. The total energy consumed is about 0.6 kWh for a on-way commute. So, assuming 1/3 efficiency for the ICE, that would require 0.6 kWh * 3 / (33.705 kWh/gallon) = 0.05 gallons of gas. The round trip commute would then require about 0.1 gallons of gas. Since it is cooler in the morning and you can park in a garage shaded from the sun, climate should require less than 0.6 kWh to go to work. At work, you could significantly reduce the energy consumption for climate by parking in the shade. You could also tint your windows, but you would never recover that cost. However, to maximize EV range, AC may be required to keep the battery cool. If you let the battery become too warm, you may consume more gas than without using AC.