Weird message from car

[Nathan Steele]

I got this message once, see below, about oil maintenance after only 312 miles. Maybe Ford wants to circulate the motor oil on occasion but I don't think enough miles are on the car for it to matter. Anybody know for sure what this message means?

 

"Eng. Oil Maintenance"

 

"Engine will run"

 

Also, I don't understand why Ford would alarm people with messages about a critical fluid like motor oil. It's like blinking the oil pressure light while you're driving down the road. Some people would go to the dealer and waste a bunch of time.

Edited March 2, 2014 at 12:45 AM by Nathan Steele

[http]

I got that message for the first time in 7,000 miles last week when it was very cold.  I just had the oil changed in December, so I am assuming the cold weather had something to do with triggering the oil maintenance mode.

 

The message appears so you know why the engine is running.  As you'll see from other postings, many of us want to know why our engine is running when we are trying to drive to stay on electric power.  If you start playing the "I want to drive on battery" game, you can go nuts trying to figure out why the engine kicked on.  I've stopped playing the game, particularly since I've been running the heat.

[Dune]

When this first happened to me I took it to the dealer, and was told that it was because it was using the same settings as a gas engine and simply needed to be reset (which he claimed to do - from 3000 miles to 10,000.  A few weeks later (and another two-hundred miles or so) it came on again and I reset the oil life again, which made it stop. 

 

Subsequently I have learned that the car monitors the amount of moisture present in the oil system, from condensation as I remember and will put itself into Oil Maintenance mode and run until the moisture is filtered out.  This would likely occur more in the cold and in cars that rarely if ever use the ICE in normal operation (I regularly drive less than 20 miles daily.).  After reading this I have simply let it do its thing the last couple of times.  It hasn't taken long either time to return to normal non-OMM (oil maintenance mode). 

[TX NRG]

From p 253 of my 2013 manual:

 

Oil Maintenance Mode (If Equipped)

The oil maintenance mode is equipped on Energi models only. The oil maintenance mode keeps the engine oil quality in good condition when you drive the vehicle with limited engine use. If the vehicle is in oil maintenance mode when you start the vehicle, a message will appear in the instrument cluster. While the vehicle is in oil maintenance mode, the vehicle will run the engine as necessary.

If you select the EV Now mode while the vehicle is in the oil maintenance mode, the oil maintenance mode will be suspended for as long as you continue driving the vehicle. The oil maintenance mode will resume the next time you start the vehicle.

Changing the engine oil and resetting the oil life monitoring system will suspend the oil maintenance mode.

[Dune]

I don't think that the manual explains it very well.  There is another thread here that explains it a lot better.  I cannot get copy and paste to work here so I would suggest simply searching the forum with "oil maintenance mode". 

 

In my experience selecting "EV Now" does not suspend OMM, and after reading the explanation on the other thread I have stopped trying to suspend it.

[meyersnole]

I don't think that the manual explains it very well.  There is another thread here that explains it a lot better.  I cannot get copy and paste to work here so I would suggest simply searching the forum with "oil maintenance mode". 

 

In my experience selecting "EV Now" does not suspend OMM, and after reading the explanation on the other thread I have stopped trying to suspend it.

Dune, are you posting from a mobile device or tablet? Or is that a work machine that has crippled something?

 

If you are on a PC you can click on the post number (in the top right of each post) and it will throw up a link with a anchor link to that post.

 

Anyway, here is the other thread Dune mentions: http://www.fordfusionenergiforum.com/topic/1576-oil-maintainance-mode/?p=9884

Edited March 2, 2014 at 03:22 PM by meyersnole

[larryh]

I find that when using a PC, half the time this forum deletes links that I paste in my posts.  I have to enclose the link in quotes to prevent it from deleting the link. 

Edited March 2, 2014 at 03:41 PM by larryh

[Dune]

Meyersnole, thanks for the heads-up and for posting the actual link.

I am not sure why it wasn't working before but I had tried it several times with no go.

It wouldn't let me copy and paste from the address bar, or even within the message.

I am actually an IT guy and this is a Lenovo Yoga2 Pro with Windows 8.1 and IE 11 (in compatibility view).

Now I can copy and paste by right clicking with both the link as you mentioned, from the address bar and within the message.

I am not certain what has changed, but it is working now where it wasn't before.  I had tried exactly these same things the day I posted above (and prior to that) and nothing was working - right click, or even the buttons here within the editor.

Edited March 4, 2014 at 11:30 AM by Dune

[viajero]

On another thread someone made a handy observation which should have been obvious but I hadn't figured it out after driving the car for a year - the messages on the dashboard are color coded.  Red for error, yellow for warning, and white for information.  White is just an FYI, and nothing is broken when you get a white message.