rpoffen

If I recall correctly, if you are subject to AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), you DON'T get the credit.

If you put the display in Empower mode, you can see exactly at what point of throttle position will keep you in EV mode without kicking in the ICE.

Over the holidays (colder than usual for our area too), while I was off work on vacation, my FFH was idle for at least a week, and it started and ran fine.

Hi oldschool1962, I followed your thread before with the first vehicle. Good to hear all is well with the replacement. I wish we could find out what Ford did with the original and what they find out about the problem. On the Nav, like most Nav systems (built-in or aftermarket), when you get to an address, the location for the address is predicted by various features and other address ranges on the street. Sometime they are off by a bit, and show the destination as a little further away that they really are. Until you actually reach the calculated location, it doesn't clear the destination. This happens at my place of work since the addresses are funky down the street because it it transitions from residential and small businesses where there is a small distance between large swings of address numbers, then it goes to large business buildings that take half a block for a single address, so it show the location for my work about 400 feet further down the street.

I keep my '98 Mustang Cobra (engine rebuilt with stroker crank, cold air intake, headers, aluminum flywheel, TKO500 tranny, aluminum driveshaft, other mods. estimate 350+hp) so when I "feel the need for speed" after driving my FFH a while, I can get my fix.

I saw the same type of thing when coming down from the western Sierra to the Bay Area in California after Thanksgiving. Started at about 3500 feet altitude with the temperature in the high 20's (snowed all weekend), the ICE kicked in quite a bit even though it is all downhill because it could not stay warm!

The way you drive it can have a big impact. If you drive like my wife, accelerating hard and staying on the accelerator until 100ft before the next stop sign or light then slamming on the brakes :shift: does not take advantage of the hybrid system's advantages. If I drive the car, I get about 42MPG, when my wife drives the car, she gets 37MPG. Make sure she has it in drive and not low.

My mileage has gone UP with cooler weather, but it is all subject to where you are. In the summer out where I live in the far east San Francisco Bay Area, 100+ degree days mean running the A/C a lot and that kills the mileage. Cooler weather out here means 50's in the morning warming to high 60's and low 70's. Don't need either the heater or A/C!

I wouldn't say I drive like a grandma, but it is more conservative than my last car (1998 Mustang Cobra), which I still have and love to drive, I just can't afford the gas and maintenance when commuting 100 miles a day!

I presume that premium gas is required because the engine is only a 1.4l engine and in order to improve efficiency and have it provide enough HP it is turbo charged. Almost all production turbo charged cars require premium gas. This further reduces its effective MPG since you have to factor the added cost of premium gas over regular which is usually at least 7-8% higher, so I would reduce the effective MPG by this amount since the bottom line is always cost, not strictly MPG.

It is probably still the long term average, but it only has a very small amount of history to base it on, so it is influenced very heavily by short term average until several hundred miles have accumulated.

Prior to my FFH, I had a 2007 V6 Fusion. Got a flat one day while driving on the freeway. Put on the spare and took the flat to a tire store to fix, and they pulled a 6" screwdriver shank out of the inside of the tire!!

Does anyone know if there is a way to tell if the TSB for the hybrid power train has been applied? When I took mine into the dealer for its first oil change (and the manual seat recliner recall), I specifically asked that they apply this TSB. When I picked up the car, they said that the oil change and the recliner recall was done and it is already to go. I asked about the power train re-program and the guy said "uh, yeah we did that too", kind of like he was unsure what I was talking about. The service order listed the oil change and the seat recall, but no mention of the power train reprogram, so I am unsure if it was done. Thanks

IMHO SprayWay aerosol glass cleaner is the absolute best. Can be kind of hard to find, but you can go to their web site, http://spraywayretail.com/?display=availability to find out who carries it.

This is also discussed in the Owner Community forums of the Ford Sync My Ride web site (www.syncmyride.com).

My '98 Mustang Cobra also came with a leather steering wheel, but the coating that colors the leather wore off after about 50K miles. This was a common complaint. Ford had (I think you can still get them for the Mustang) an FR500 steering wheel as part of their Motorsports accessories. It was a direct replacement, just move over your airbag module and steering wheel switch module (cruise control). This wheel is 200% better quality than the stock one. Not sure if there is anything similar for the newer cars.

Keep in mind that the altitude display from GPS is not very accurate, it could be a few hundred feet off. The more satellites it can "see" improves the accuracy some.

Did you have the parking brake engaged when you ran the VHR? If so, you will get this message. Run the VHR without the parking brake engaged.

You can't compare the fact that the engine in the FFH is 2.5l compares with the 2.5l in the SE. They are quite different engines. The FFH uses a modified Atkinson cycle engine. By modified, it is not truly the same as the original Atkinson cycle design because the original had a somewhat complex gearing arrangement to actually have a different stroke on the piston for the power stroke compared to the intake stroke. In the modified version the physical stroke length is the same for both power and intake cycle but the Atkinson "phenomena" is simulated by delaying the opening on the intake valve. Because of this, an Atkinson cycle engine, while deriving more efficiency from the burning fuel/air mixture than a conventional "Otto" cycle engine, generates less power per given displacement than an Otto cycle engine. It is not clear if the electric motor fully compensates for this loss of power or not. Certainly under pure EV mode, the FFH isn't winning any drag races.

That is my understanding.

Personally I prefer them to be on all the time. I find that for the most part, Japanese vehicles turn them off with the key, but American cars don't. I use it for charging my phone and hate it when I can't leave my phone in the car to charge while I go in to a store for a while or something.

The description I read is that the fan pulls air from the cabin to maintain the HVB temperature. The HVB likes temperatures similar to what people like, so it made sense to use cabin air to either cool (in summer) or heat (in winter) the battery.

I believe this is the automatic headlamp sensor, NOT the climate control sensor.

You are aware that the A/C *IS* an accessory aren't you? Unlike conventional (non-hybrid) cars, the A/C compressor is NOT driven from the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine), it is an electrically powered unit similar to the one in your refrigerator or home A/C unit and draws directly off the HVB (High Voltage Battery). And yes indeed it sucks a LOT of power. Running on full on a hot day I have seen it start out pushing the accessory meter almost halfway up. This drops as the temperature inside the car starts to come down to your climate control set point. Unlike the engine driven compressors of the past which could only merely cycle off and on as needed, the one in the Fusion hybird is actually variable, always running, but only as hard as necessary for the conditions.

If I recall correctly, TANSTAAFL was first coined by the author Larry Niven in his books and short stories from his series "Tales of Known Space".