I’m just finishing up my first week with a 2019 Energi. So far, I’m loving it.
I’m coming from a gas-guzzler point of view. I traded in a 2015 Dodge Challenger Scat Pack (6.4L) that averaged 18MPG for the Energi. The new car certainly isn’t as fast, but it’s a lot cheaper to drive!
I recently bought a home out in the country, and now my commute is 50 miles each way. I started making the drive using my “regular” car, a 2016 Dodge Charger with another 6.4L Hemi in it. I was driving like a grandpa, getting around 22MPG, which isn’t horrible for such a huge car, but I was still filling it up with premium gas every three days at around $45. That started getting old fast. Then I started driving my wife’s Toyota with around 30MPG, but a smaller tank. I was still filling up every three days, but at half the cost. Still not great.
I decided that it was time to look at a hybrid, but I didn’t like the way most of them looked, except for the Fusion. I set up a test drive from Avis to maybe purchase a previous rental. I chose a 2019 Fusion Hybrid SE with 16K on the odometer for aroung $15k. I drove it to work and back a couple of days, and I was highly impressed with the 45MPG+ that I was seeing. The only issue that I had with it was that while I was playing around in the setup menus, I foolishly assumed that “MYKEY” was a feature like on all of my other cars that personalized the key to the settings, like the seats and radio. I don’t know why Ford doesn’t call it “MYKIDKEY”. I only had the one key, so I was stuck in that mode. It was enough to make me return the car!
I had the fusion bug, and since electricity is cheap where I live, I wanted a plug-in hybrid. I found a dealership with a 2019 that had 9K on the clock for $21K. I test drove it, then bought it.
I was a bit concerned at first when I was looking at the trip settings, which had never been reset, and saw that in its 9K history, it only had around 800 EV miles and average MPG was around 38, but from what I’d seen in the normal hybrid, it should have been higher. Later I found the old registration and insurance papers in the glove compartment and saw that it was previously owned by a Ford dealership, so maybe it was a loaner or something like that. Maybe it hardly ever got plugged in.
In any case, I started charging it at night and driving it to work. The results have been pretty outstanding. I had filled up the tank on Sunday evening and drove home in EV Mode so that I started with a completely full tank on Monday morning. After 5 days of my 100 mile round-trip commute and some around-town errands, I still had 1/4 tank left and 150 miles left in the dash display. The displayed average MPG was 60.3, and my calculator said 60.6. It costs me about $0.80 per day to charge the plug-in battery (assuming 100% efficiency), so I can add $4 to the fuel cost per week. Considering that it’s been a cold week, I can probably do better when it starts warming up in a few months.
There are chargers at work so I could get even more out of it, but those chargers are expensive! They don’t charge by how much energy you use, but by time spent charging. It would take me around 3 hours to charge up, and they charge $2 a hour. Spending $6 to go 25 miles isn’t very cost effective!
I’ve been reading a lot of posts here, and there’s lots of good info, though it’s not nearly as active as the Dodge forums that I usually frequent. Probably a lot fewer of us, I’m sure! Bee seeing you around!
