treeofliberty

I had real problems in this area, for over a year, and they started nearly the day we bought the car. A f ew months into this, we took the car to the dealer with intermittent BLIS faults and they did nothing, not being able "to reproduce the problem". I lived with faults for about a year, until they were happening daily. I took it back in, and they replaced one of the side mirrors, saying that is what the Ford docs said to do. This didn't fix the problem so I took it back and they replaced the other mirror, which did eliminate the problem. All that being said, I have received the stuck indicators and faults when driving a distance next to a hard surface (like a wall on the freeway). This happens very infrequently and I do believe it is simply inherent to the system. I also had this happen in the pouring rain (infrequent in Phoenix). Here are the errors I was getting prior to the fix.

There has also been lots of discussion in other threads about the fuel pump being located in the bottom of the tank, using the gas as coolant. Running the tank dry could be bad for the pump over the long haul, hence the skewed computer numbers. Like you cite, I've always chickened out before reaching "0 miles to E". One of these days I going to do it, just to see what the fuel guage looks like.

I'm aware of that cool feat. I was wondering what was the largest "miles to E" readout was, upon filling the tank. It would be interesting to see what the computer came up with after that record-setting stunt.

I couldn't agree more on the cat warm-up. Geesh these emissions laws are rediculous. In the winter months in Phoenix, I must drive 5 minutes before EV is even an option. I couldn't imagine what it is like for folks that live in real cold weather. I'm torn on the memory seats. They're cool on our 2003 Tahoe, but they're starting to flake out, transitioning from convenience to irritant. Now you have to adjust the seats and mirrors every time you drive the thing, even if you were the last one to drive it. Electronic features would be better if the degraded gracefully. Too often, they go wacky before they die altogether. My biggest desire would be: Plugin/Lithium option (as already mentioned). Think of the range! Diesel/hybrid option. Think about the extra mileage and durability diesel engines have. I wonder why diesels are not appropriate for hybrid technology?

My wife thinks I am uber geek when I pull this stuff. "What is it with men and numbers?" I don't have a good answer. It's just cool. Congrats on 746 miles to E. Now you have me wondering what the "record" is. There is something liberating about having this kind of range.

I think my recent mileage, right before the fillup, made some sort of impact here. Subsequent fillups have not registered the same 700+ mile range. My hypermiling games that I played during the previous tank (45-50MPG) appears to have made the computer more optimistic when projecting from the full tank.

I have a little over 15,000 miles at the moment. My commute is very flat. Under ideal circumstances (morning traffic and temps in the 60-80 range), while drafting trucks and maintaining an average speed in the 65mph range, I can pull mileage numbers between 48-50 MPG. However, this drops off considerably if any hills are involved, or I jump up over 70mph, or "push my own air" instead of drafting. On long trips, where the speed limit is 75 and I drive 80, my mileage drops down to the 35-38 range. On a hot summer commute home, with temps above 110, I will also pull mileage numbers in the upper 30's. The old addage "your mileage may vary" really does apply here. Still, I suspect your computer is still learning. Keep an eye on your tire pressure. I got lazy and found my pressure had dropped to around 28psi and bumped it back up to 38. This made a noticeable (few MPG) improvement.

I've been bored with my 38-mile (one-way) commute and have been entertaining myself with attempts to boost my long term mileage. At the start of this little game, my long term mileage, which hasn't been reset in thosands of miles, was right at 40.0. After 2 tanks, it is up to 42.3. The bulk of this mileage comes from my daily commute on the Phoenix freeways. After the first tank, I was rewarded with my best range ever, 724 miles: Just after the second tank, coming back from a photo outing, I was able to display a perfect 20-minute window of maxed out mileage graphs: None of this means much in the grand scheme of things. It was just fun to pull off.

I've had intermittant "Blind Spot System Fault" and "Cross Traffic System Fault" messages now since buying the car, back in July. The RF interferance theory makes sense. Most of the time, the sensor on the passenger side is the one that goes out, and it's often while driving in urban freeway traffic, althought that's the lion's share of my FFH driving. Attempts to have this serviced by the dealership monkeys have been a waste of time, although I did get a "free" car wash in exchange for an overpriced oil change. I'm starting to think this is a design flaw, rather than a build flaw.

As my mind tends to wander (and wonder) during my 40-mile commute, I began thinking about the Arizona Dept of Transportation cameras that blanket the Phoenix freeway system. One can get on the ADOT web site and get a picture of traffic at dozens of spots on the freeway. From time to time, I peak at them before driving home, to see what I'm getting into. <politics> I don't approve of all this domestic spying our various governments are performing, of which I'm funding, adding insult to injury. :banghead: </politics> This lead me to dream about how cool it would be to integrate this into Sync, and be able to touch the Nav screen at a point on my route and bring up a happy snap from the traffic camera. All the connectivity is there. It's just an integration problem. If ADOT geotagged the images, one could even imagine a fairly general solution that wouldn't be ADOT specific. Any traffic camera that geotagged could be linked in. That led me to think about the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Palm Pre. What if Microsoft published an API for the Sync system, which allowed third-party application developers to come up with all kinds of new applications for Sync, which could be purchaced from an app store, accessible from Sync. How many people have purchased iPhones because of the myriad of applications you can run on it? They're certainly not buying it for the AT&T phone service. This kind of buzz could really sell cars and reinvent the way onboard systems are built. OK, this topic should have been put up in the Sync forum, but I like our corner of the forum better. And if by some means this idea gets legs and becomes reality, consider this my copyright notice. :happy feet:

I work on the Intel side of the house, which hasn't been hit too hard (yet). The F-35 Lightning II has a Navy variant, so technically we are working on a Navy fighter, and that aircraft is pretty innovative too, although not quite as awesome as the Raptor.

Hey, a Valley Forge guy. Cool. I work for Lockheed and am frequently in Valley Forge. My favorite VF activity is grabbing the camera and loitering in the National Park. Keep experimenting with the hypermiling and share your techniques.

Wow, those are amazing numbers. Even with your numbers going home your average is very impressive. I'm anxious to see how things average in the fall, when I can stop using the A/C. Congrats on breaking the 60 mark, which I'm sure puts you in a very small class of your own. That's territory usually reserved to the Prius owners. Pretty cool to pull that out with a full-sized sedan.

Broke my record this morning with a surprising 50.2mpg for the commute (according to the computer). Traffic was perfect and I hit many of the lights, allowing extended stealth mode driving.

As with most others, I've been playing the moderate hypermiling game with my FFH since picking it up. Sitting here in the middle of hottest part of a Phoenix summer, this has translated into unbelievable mileage in the morning commute (5-6am) and moderately wonderful mileage coming home (4-5pm). My commute consists of 5.5 miles out to I-10, with a slight upward grade, about 30 miles on I-10 (all flat), and about 3 miles from I-10 to the office, with a very slight downward grade. Unlike my prior driving habbits, I now try to keep to around 45mph on the regular streets and around 70 on I-10. For my three morning commutes this week, I was able to get 46.4, 47.0, and 46.5mpg, according to the computer. The corresponding drives home usually dropped the day's average to about 42-43mpg, meaning I was getting around 39-40mpg on the drive home in the 105-110 degree heat and heavy traffic. This week's commuting was interrupted by a quick 800-mile business trip to New Mexico. This trip included hills, a passenger, and faster speeds (nearly 80mph). My overall mileage for the trip was 35.5mpg. The morning commute, with the lighter traffic and cooler temperatures, has become a hypermiling lab for me. My attention is glued to the traffic patterns and the instrument cluster, set to Empower. 47.0 appears to be the upper limit on what I can achieve with the FFH, without extreme measures, like truck drafting and dropping to grandpa speeds. This all makes me curious about the numbers I'll see when the weather cools back down. The FFH is certainly delivering on the number one reason I bought: commuting mileage.