Here's the problem:
If one of your main charging stations is at around 1000 feet or more elevation higher than your commute you will have to go down that drop in elevation with a full charge unless you manually stop the charging before it is full. Why is this a problem? For three reasons. First of all it is a waist of all the potential energy that could be captured by regenerative braking as you drive down the drop in elevation. Secondly it causes unnecessary wear on your break pads. Thirdly the car doesn't handle as good going down the hill and the L mode (low) is disabled because the computer is preventing any regeneration from occurring in order to not overcharge the batteries.
I experience this each day as I drop down 1000 feet to the town a few miles from home. This must be really bad for people with even larger elevation drops miles from their home on their daily commute. Even people at a few hundred feet elevation drop would benefit from an update that will fix this.
I also just purchased the 2014 Fusion Energi and it has the same problem but it is even worse because if you put it in low it turns on the engine to "engine brake" all the way down the hill and it has a super high revving engine noise and wastes gas instead of creating electricity. It is honestly a surprisingly overlooked design flaw in the software.
The solution should be a simple update to the software. It should have a charge percentage feature that lets turn down your total "Location Charge Percentage" for any given charging station that you save to your GPS Markers. That way it could be your home or you work, or any point that is at a much higher elevation than where you will be going next. I was told by a Tesla sales rep that their software does have this feature.
How do we get Ford to put this into an upcoming software update?
If one of your main charging stations is at around 1000 feet or more elevation higher than your commute you will have to go down that drop in elevation with a full charge unless you manually stop the charging before it is full. Why is this a problem? For three reasons. First of all it is a waist of all the potential energy that could be captured by regenerative braking as you drive down the drop in elevation. Secondly it causes unnecessary wear on your break pads. Thirdly the car doesn't handle as good going down the hill and the L mode (low) is disabled because the computer is preventing any regeneration from occurring in order to not overcharge the batteries.
I experience this each day as I drop down 1000 feet to the town a few miles from home. This must be really bad for people with even larger elevation drops miles from their home on their daily commute. Even people at a few hundred feet elevation drop would benefit from an update that will fix this.
I also just purchased the 2014 Fusion Energi and it has the same problem but it is even worse because if you put it in low it turns on the engine to "engine brake" all the way down the hill and it has a super high revving engine noise and wastes gas instead of creating electricity. It is honestly a surprisingly overlooked design flaw in the software.
The solution should be a simple update to the software. It should have a charge percentage feature that lets turn down your total "Location Charge Percentage" for any given charging station that you save to your GPS Markers. That way it could be your home or you work, or any point that is at a much higher elevation than where you will be going next. I was told by a Tesla sales rep that their software does have this feature.
How do we get Ford to put this into an upcoming software update?
