From Dream to Nightmare in 24 hours: Did I buy a lemon?

[Ffe]

Shawnee Mission Ford in Kansas just got something around $19.5k after taxes from me for a 2017 Ford Fusion Energy Platinum with 45k miles.  I was absolutely elated with the condition and all the features I was getting.....

 

Until I was backing out of a parking spot and lost all motive power.  The vehicle stopped backing up with my foot still on the gas.  And it started beeping and flashing dash LEDs like a slot machine.

 

I'm new to fords, but I believe I was hearing the parking anti-colision assist beep going nuts.  The grey representation of the car that usually has 360 degree sensor bars that change from grey to red to indicate an obstable,  was all grey.  no obstacles indicated.  And it had a red and white exclamation on it.

 

Oh SH......... What did I get into?

 

I bought it yesterday and now I feel like I'm in a sitcom gag about how terrible used cars always are.

 

At about 1:50 p.m. today Wednesday February 24th. I got in my car and put it in reverse to exit a parking spot.

 

I immediately started hearing the proximity beep as if I was going to back into something but there was nothing inbehind the car.  I could see the video from behind the car on the screen and there were no obstacles.

 

When I looked at the 360 animation to see where the obstacle was,  I didn't see any indications of what direction the obstacle was in.   (Normally it would turn from Gray to Green then orange then red but all directions were gray indicating no obstacles) 

 

Instead I saw a red and white round symbol over the middle of the grey car icon that which had an exclamation point in it. I looked down to the parking assist disable switch and I noticed that the "parking assist off" light was blinking erratically.

 

I was blocking the parking lot at the time so I got up my phone to record all the symptoms instead of writing them down right there.

 

Here you go:

https://youtu.be/gnb3_mnYnIo

https://youtu.be/VNkWHWJnsSI

https://youtu.be/IU07J2ITueY

 

My initial gut instinct is to bring it right back for a complete refund. Without talking to an attorney, I'm not sure if I have that right or not, and frankly I still do very much like the feature list and the interior and this particular model. But I cannot have an unreliable car.

 

It was absolutely gut-wrenching. Before we had breakfast today I was singing such high praises of this vehicle to my husband and had sent videos to my family I was so proud.  I was literally shouting "OH MY GOD THIS IS TOO AWESOME" as I discovered new features for the first time this morning.

 

Less than an hour later I was pressing the gas pedal and getting very very little acceleration. It was more than idle speed at least when I'm familiar with idle speed from any other car. And it was able to accelerate to about 40 miles an hour while it was experiencing this malfunction without my foot on the gas and without cruise control on. the brake pedal worked of course or I probably wouldn't be writing this right now.  If it happens again I think my first action is going to be to have my passengers exit the car immediately for their safety.  

 

We were planning a trip tomorrow, specifically to show off this car to my in-laws and now the shame is palpable.

 

I really hope it was just some sort of one time fluke. But even then, my confidence in this vehicle has been permanently damaged after witnessing such a spectacular light show on the dashboard and the more beeping than a slot machine at a casino.

 

I did not ask my husband to cancel tomorrow's trip and yet I'm pretty sure he's already made the phone call. ?

 

What would you guys do?

Edited February 25, 2021 at 01:08 AM by Ffe
add details and link

[murphy]

It is physically impossible for the gasoline engine to move the car in reverse.  There are no gears in the transmission to provide reverse.  Reverse is only provided by one of the electric motors being powered to run backwards.

 

The gas pedal is not connected to the engine.  It is connected to the computer.  The computer decides what RPM to run the engine at.  There is no correlation between engine RPM and vehicle speed.  You have to forget everything you know about engine sounds and vehicle speed.

 

Is the car clean?  There are 4 ultrasonic sensors on the rear bumper that are used to detect objects behind the car.  If they are dirty they don't work very well.

Cross traffic detection is provided by a radar transceiver in each of the rear fenders.  I always have beeping as I back out of my garage.  Quite often I get a cross traffic alert from the light pole beside my driveway. 

 

Given this information can you re-evaluate your situation.  I'm not saying there is nothing wrong.  It's just that this car is radically different from anything you have driven before.  Your Ford dealer must be electric certified to be qualified to analyze problems with the car.  Not all dealers spent the money to have technicians and sales persons trained to sell and service the car.

 

Good luck.  I have a 2013 and most of my driving has been electric only.   For the last year it has mostly been parked in my garage due to Covid-19.

[Ffe]

Good points.  My last car was a 2010 Prius for 11 years, which seemed quite..... spartan, compared to this focus!

 

I know the gas pedal is totally drive by wire and I probably shouldn't call it gas pedal but accelerator pedal.

 

Its not perfectly clean, but I haven't gone off roading it or anything lol.  There's no large blocks of snow or ice stuck to it.  If the backup sensors were actually covered say for instance in a beehive, could that result and loss of motive power? I may be a little spoiled but I would expect if the sensors were dirty I would have much fewer errors and hopefully one of them would hint at cleaning the sensors.

 

When the sensors are dirty, would the amber "off" led on the park assist switch flicker?  I saw that happening.

[Ffe]

Great news!  I got service records from the dealer.  (Probably should have done that BEFORE buying....) and they didn't redact the original owner's name!

 

I was able to call him and had a great conversation talking about EVs and he filled me in on the vehicle's history and gave me more confidence that all is not lost.  I may have had a false sense of EVs being more common than they are after driving my Prius for a decade.  It seems in this city (Kansas City) dealers/shops still see EVs as something unusual and scary.  I'm still a little nervous about the dealership.  But I want to keep the car again!!!  Thanks to the talk with the previous owner, who might just be on this site too.  I think I made a new friend!

 

We think my experience may be due to the dealership wiping the computer before I took ownership.  I asked them to, referring in my mind to Sync3 and the infotainment/contacts/radio/phone stuff.  But maybe they also wiped some of the tuning they did over the car's life to address issues original owner noticed and reported.  Some of them definitely recurred.

 

I got the impression that the KC Ford dealerships all more or less share the same "EV guy" who is the only one with the stones to work on Energi's, and he works each location on a rotating schedule, so it might be a little while until my Fusion is restored, but they put me in a no fee loaner in the meantime.  I need to get that EV guy's number!

[murphy]

The word "wipe" triggered something in my brain.  If the 12 volt battery is disconnected or dies all of the operating parameters for the engine that have been learned over time are lost.  The car must be driven through varying conditions for them to be relearned.  My Owner's manual is hiding from me at the moment but I think the procedure is in the Owner's Manual.

 

Dealer's don't like the Energi because they can't sell you an unneeded oil change every 3000 miles. 

An Energi needs an oil change every 2 years or 20,000 miles, whichever comes first.  Don't get confused by the Owner's Manual.  The same manual is used for the Energi and the Hybrid.  The Hybrid is every year or 10,000 miles, whichever comes first.

 

[Ffe]

Good to know.  I was thinking I would end up having to jerryrig some mechanism for measuring the miles traveled under internal combustion separately from the total mileage and using that divided by 5000 or 10000 Mi to schedule one of my oil changes.

 

The dealer ended up calling me back in and giving me a complete refund. I think they figured out that I got a copy of the warranty work history records and want to remove the $20,000 incentive for me to sue their ass for not disclosing it before the sale.

 

I still want a Ford Fusion energi.  I just placed a hold on caravana for 2019. But once I get it, I think I'm going to hand over all the recordings of my dealing with this dealership to a local news station.

 

Maybe they'll buy the same lemon with hidden cameras or something and catch them pretending to know nothing about it and congratulating them on such a great purchase like they did with me. I am confident now, seeing the repair records that took place at that very same dealership and knowing that they probably sold a handful of energis in the last decade, that the service guys know that vehicle by sight. They didn't seem the least bit surprised when I pulled it into the service bay a day after buying it.

 

I've got audio now of the general manager, Casey, saying he didn't know about the warranty history and me reading it to him word by word off of a paper that I got from his own damn service department. So if he sells it to someone in the future wants to play stupid again, he's done.

 

And the crazy part is if he had marked it down a bit to compensate for the uncertainty I will always feel every time I try to start it, and thrown in their best dealer warranty that covered problems like this, I probably would have kept it.

Edited March 1, 2021 at 12:24 AM by Ffe

[Willy662]

I bought a 2017 Energi at the end of 2018 at a steep discount. Paid about 24.5k for a 34k MSRP car and ended up at around 18k after the federal tax credit and incentives from the state and county. I did later buy the 8 year 125k mile warranty for around $1700. It has given me great peace of mind and will continue to do so until around 2025. Having said that, after 32k miles, it has given me not one bit of problems. I use the car to commute between homes around 125 miles apart. It gets great gas mileage when on gas which I use very little of in town. I can still go around 25 miles on battery alone. Love this car!