evilyn
Active Member
- Thread starter
- #1
Made a short trip today from San Jose to Carmel and back. It's not a range test, I simply decided to see what I can expect on a regular weekend trip. Traffic was light, the weather nice ~80F, no excessive wind, no big change in elevation.
The total distance was 168.4 miles, and overall efficiency 2.9 mi/kWh. I was driving on US-101 at 75 mph for most part. The efficiency was actually pretty good on a smooth road surface, over 3 mi/kWh. I saw the same numbers in both direction, so the wind wasn't a factor. I think people who got poor efficiency numbers were driving on bad pavements. I found GOM (guess-o-meter) to be pretty precise in terms of SoC % for the trip, even somewhat conservative, though distance to empty is always overestimated. That means the navigation planning is reliable, just ignore the distances.
I like the car a lot, very comfortable ride, good suspension, reasonably quiet, lots of power for passing. What I don't like is software. The menus are unintuitive, the fonts are small, you need reading glasses to see. When I was already on the road I found the left mirror looking down, I couldn't remember were the mirror adjustments were, tried to find it while driving and trying not to end in a ditch. After a minute digging through menus I gave up. Found the menu item when arrived to the destination in a surprising place. I wish I could say everything I think about it to the engineer who decided it was a good idea. Things like that should have physical controls, not being hidden in menus. In general, lack of physical controls is a very bad design decision. Also, using a stalk instead of traditional buttons on the wheel for ACC/UHF is a bad decision, the annoying chimes that can't be silenced is another bad decision, not having resume function is a very bad decision.
Overall, I found ACC/UHF to be poor, often disengaging on curves, with some jerky moves. I never felt safe to let it drive hands free. The lane centering was not confident, often drifting to the left. Lane changing is useless, it thinks too much losing opportunities, I was always changing lanes myself. And the fact that the car doesn't automatically adjust speed and doesn't have a resume function makes UHF impractical on anything but straight empty roads.
Bottom line, the car itself is great, efficiency is good, but software is pretty awful. This is the opposite of my previous Mach-E, which had questionable ride quality, making passengers sick, but on the other hand it had pretty good software and physical controls.
The total distance was 168.4 miles, and overall efficiency 2.9 mi/kWh. I was driving on US-101 at 75 mph for most part. The efficiency was actually pretty good on a smooth road surface, over 3 mi/kWh. I saw the same numbers in both direction, so the wind wasn't a factor. I think people who got poor efficiency numbers were driving on bad pavements. I found GOM (guess-o-meter) to be pretty precise in terms of SoC % for the trip, even somewhat conservative, though distance to empty is always overestimated. That means the navigation planning is reliable, just ignore the distances.
I like the car a lot, very comfortable ride, good suspension, reasonably quiet, lots of power for passing. What I don't like is software. The menus are unintuitive, the fonts are small, you need reading glasses to see. When I was already on the road I found the left mirror looking down, I couldn't remember were the mirror adjustments were, tried to find it while driving and trying not to end in a ditch. After a minute digging through menus I gave up. Found the menu item when arrived to the destination in a surprising place. I wish I could say everything I think about it to the engineer who decided it was a good idea. Things like that should have physical controls, not being hidden in menus. In general, lack of physical controls is a very bad design decision. Also, using a stalk instead of traditional buttons on the wheel for ACC/UHF is a bad decision, the annoying chimes that can't be silenced is another bad decision, not having resume function is a very bad decision.
Overall, I found ACC/UHF to be poor, often disengaging on curves, with some jerky moves. I never felt safe to let it drive hands free. The lane centering was not confident, often drifting to the left. Lane changing is useless, it thinks too much losing opportunities, I was always changing lanes myself. And the fact that the car doesn't automatically adjust speed and doesn't have a resume function makes UHF impractical on anything but straight empty roads.
Bottom line, the car itself is great, efficiency is good, but software is pretty awful. This is the opposite of my previous Mach-E, which had questionable ride quality, making passengers sick, but on the other hand it had pretty good software and physical controls.
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