Red HyTi arrived

[milleron]

My car was received by my dealer in Columbus, OH, last evening, and I'll take delivery this afternoon. I post this only because it may be the first Ruby Red Hybrid Titanium to reach a member of this Forum. I'll try to get photos up later today.

 

Wazzul, if you have one out there in Seattle Portland (oops, sorry), please let us know and post pics.

Edited April 26, 2013 by milleron

[neod192]

Woo hoo ! Congrats :)

[acdii]

Is it wrong to lust after a car? There was a RR SE on the showroom floor yesterday, I swear i was drooling.

[wazzul]

Mine checked in to the rail yard in Bend, OR this morning at 4am. Still has to travel another 163 miles to Portland. I'm hopeful that I'll get lucky and have it by early next week. I'm ok with having the second Ruby HyTi in the US! Congrats on getting yours today, of course we DO want pics!!

[milleron]

Sorry that the sun wasn't out for these photos. This car is photogenic, so I'll try to get some that do it justice and add them later. The color calibration is obviously a little off, as anyone who's seen Ruby Red can tell. It's significantly deeper than these pictures show.

 

It has no "click - clunk," at least not yet, but as soon as we drove it around the block, an orange wrench icon showed up on the left display, which means "powertrain fault." It drives perfectly, and gave me 40.2 mpg on my first jaunt around town which was mostly freeway driving. The icon went away but came back again, so she's going back to the dealer at 8:30 AM for an OBD-II reading. The other feature I couldn't make work was the automatic high-beam. The high beams came on automatically, but they wouldn't go off automatically whether facing oncoming headlights or following other cars pretty closely. I'm so glad to have her after the 17-week wait, though, that I don't really care much.

I became enamored of the FFH because of the many advanced driver-assist features, and all the other ones worked to perfection -- lane keeping, adaptive cruise, Eco-cruise, rain-sensing wipers, BLIS, cross traffic (which actually did warn me of an approaching car in the mall's parking garage), voice recognition, remote start. I haven't had a chance to try the park assist. I'm not an audiophile. In fact, I have a high-frequency hearing loss, but the Sony sound system showed me instantly what I've been missing in automobile audio for the last umpteen years. That alone makes the Titanium upgrade worthwhile.

 

Even though I'd read the manual twice and followed the thread on hybrid-driving tips and techniques closely, the learning curve is going to be fairly steep for me. There's a lot to watch and keep track of.

 

By the way, this car made it from Hermosillo to Detroit in 12 days and from Detroit to my dealer by truck in two days. It beat Ford's ETA by 7 days.

 

[milleron]

Mine checked in to the rail yard in Bend, OR this morning at 4am. Still has to travel another 163 miles to Portland. I'm hopeful that I'll get lucky and have it by early next week. I'm ok with having the second Ruby HyTi in the US! Congrats on getting yours today, of course we DO want pics!!

 

Interestingly, my car checked into the rail yard near Flat Rock, MI around 4 am Monday (three days ago), and it arrived by truck at my dealer, about 165 miles from Flat Rock, before closing on Wednesday. It's conceivable that you might see yours this weekend, "early next week" at the outside.

[wazzul]

I sure hope so! I've tracking it like crazy, so much so that I have notes for each stop it's made along the wary. I figure it will go in the scrap book after the pictures of my first born.

Glad you got your car, sorry to hear it had to go back right away. Hope that's an easy fix! Ours were built very close to one another so I'll be very curious of what you find out.

Well my car left Bend today just before 3p and it's 217 railroad miles (non-stop, I hope) to the white flag!

[CombsAuthor]

Congrats! That's a beautiful car.

[jeff_h]

Great looking car! And I bet you'll get good MPG too, Ruby Reds get the best MPG. :happy feet:

[acdii]

As I said before, is it wrong to lust after a Ruby Red Fusion? That is a remarkable color, no matter which car its on. There was a Cmax I test drove, nearly bought, wishing I did now, that was Ruby Red. Between the RR, DIB and OW, they would make one hell of a US Flag.

[milleron]

Turns out that there was nothing really wrong with the car and nothing to fault the good folks at Hermosillo for. There was a little moisture in the connector to the sensor for the inverter cooler. It was cured by the application of some waterproof grease. No biggie.

 

Something very interesting did turn up today, and perhaps I should start a new topic with this, but I'll start here. The recommended inflation pressure for the tires on a FFH is 35 psi front and rear. Mine came from the factory at 44 psi all around. The max inflation pressure for the Goodyear Eagle LS is 51 psi.

 

Now there are many hypermilers who advocate pressures even greater than the manufacturer's maximum. This was probably a glitch, but it occurred to me that it's just possible that this is Ford's way of turning a "normal rolling resistance tyre" (as appears on the Etis build sheet) into a low rolling resistance tire. Has anyone else with a new FFH checked the pressures at delivery? If so, what were they?

[jeff_h]

Now there are many hypermilers who advocate pressures even greater than the manufacturer's maximum. This was probably a glitch, but it occurred to me that it's just possible that this is Ford's way of turning a "normal rolling resistance tyre" (as appears on the Etis build sheet) into a low rolling resistance tire. Has anyone else with a new FFH checked the pressures at delivery? If so, what were they?

 

I posted my individual tire pressures somewhere here about 2 months ago, don't remember the specific numbers but they were 'consitently inconsistent'... unless my gauge was jacked up. They had pressures such as 35, 32, 40, and 38. I made them all 40.