MrCurvedLimos

Yes, it does have a smaller gas tank. That was a tradeoff I was willing to accept for rarely ever needing to use the gas engine in town. Fill up a bit more often on road trips, but hit a lifetime average of about 75 mpg overall for my mix of driving... pretty good for a truck. The extra chunk of batteries also carves into the towing capacity. It has a teeny tiny towing capacity. By the time I hook a trailer to it, there's hardly any weight allowance left for loading anything in the trailer.

If it were prolonged downhill stretches, I'd be fine with that, especially on the highway. That was when I used Grade Assist on the C-Max. But in my case, it's backing out of my driveway, put the car in gear, take my foot off the brake, and the engine comes on for 140 feet until I get to the stop sign just past my neighbor's house. On the dash it pops the message "Engine enabled for system performance." There's nothing prolonged about it; it happens within about a second of taking your foot off the brake from a stop, and the engine runs for only 10 seconds and shuts off again when the car stops at the intersection. The system tries to hold the car at 6 mph and won't let it coast normally like you expect a car to coast down a hill. You have to put your foot on the accelerator to even get to 15 mph, and that's dangerous given the distance is so short, because you also have to get your foot back to the brake to stop before winding up in the intersection. It's also an inconsistent braking experience. As you slow to a stop, there's an instant where the regen cuts out before the car is stopped. You feel like you're braking to a nice controlled stop, and all of a sudden the regen cuts out and the car starts accelerating again. If you're not prepared to push your foot down harder on the brake, it catches you by surprise. You either end up jamming your foot on the brake for an emergency stop, or you're out in the middle of the intersection. In contrast to that, when the car is in neutral, it accelerates like any other car just by coasting, you can modulate your speed keeping your foot on the brake (no need to move your foot to the accelerator), braking action is smooth, and no surprise regen cut-out at the bottom of the hill. The strangest part to me is, we had that C-Max Energi for 8 years, which was an earlier generation the same plugin hybrid platform. It had none of these quirks. Ford took a good system and made it significantly worse, I think just to eliminate a button on the shifter.

Hi BoomerSooner, nice review. Thanks for posting! My wife and I traded in a 2015 a C-Max Energi SEL to buy our 2023 Escape PHEV Premium, which we took delivery of in June. We're approaching the 5000 mile mark on ours. Unfortunately, I'm going to need to get it back in the shop here soon. We've had 2 infant mortality problems with ours: 1) The cargo cover has broken for the second time now, and 2) the passenger side-curtain airbag has quit functioning for the second time now. It's already been in the shop to have both of those fixed once before. It took us a couple months to figure out how to drive it, because the grade assist causes the gas engine to come on ALL. THE. TIME around town when we're going down hills, even when it's in EV Now mode. It's just the dumbest thing, and there's no way to turn grade assist off. Fortunately, someone here clued me in that putting the car in neutral disables grade assist. By now, we've figured out which streets around town we have to put the car in neutral to coast down, and for the most part it stays on electric, except when we forget and take our foot off the accelerator before switching to neutral, at which instant the gas engine fires up immediately to provide unneeded engine braking. Never had that problem with the C-Max; it had a grade assist button and we just turned it off. "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" For the most part, I like the vehicle. It's easy to drive on the highway with its adaptive cruise control and lane keeping assist. My wife and I had to leave work unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon and take a 5-hour drive to Oregon one day in August, driving 2 cars, and I was driving the Escape. I wasn't fatigued when we got to our destination, which simply never happens for me, especially when I'm driving solo. The driving position is good, the seats are comfortable, and visibility is pretty good except for around the A-pillars. We like the turning radius, and parking is easy. The 360° camera is a nice feature but we rarely need to use it for parking. We're slowly getting used to all the beeps and squawks, like the cross-traffic alert when you're backing out of a parking space and its radar picks up traffic out on the street that isn't even an issue in the parking lot. I do wish it was a little quieter in the cabin on the highway. I have a sound meter app on my phone, and the C-Max registered about 72 dB on certain known stretches of highway. The Escape registers about 74 dB on those same stretches of highway, with the same app on the same phone. I'd very much like to have those 2 dB back, so we're considering taking the Escape to a custom shop to have additional soundproofing installed. Probably my biggest gripe (after the grade assist, of course) is the touch screen. The controls tend to be inconsistent with each other and just don't make that much sense. I could go on and on about that. In fact, I did, but then I accidentally hit a button on my tablet and lost about 4 paragraphs, so never mind. I'll stop here.

Additionally, there's an "EV Charge" mode that can be used to charge the battery from the gas engine while driving. I always figured that was for road trips, so you wouldn't have to worry about finding charging stations. But it could be useful in this scenario as well, I suppose. Or perhaps you're asking whether it's a problem if the power goes off while the car is plugged in charging? I wouldn't expect it to be, but I don't actually know.

There's an automatic setting, and if I remember how it works, when you press the button to turn the climate control on, it always turns on in auto mode. The thing I've observed about auto mode is that it tries to get to its setpoint as fast as possible. If the interior temp is higher than the setpoint, auto mode will turn on with max AC at the highest fan setting, to try to get the temp down to the setpoint as fast as possible. If the interior is cold, it will turn on max heat and max fan. Of course it doesn't heat instantly, so when the system comes on in heat-defrost mode it will blow cold air for defrost for the first few seconds until the heater warms up enough to overcome the defroster. When it gets near the desired temp, it will turn down the fan and the AC-or-heat automatically, to maintain the cabin temp at the setpoint. I suspect that's what you're experiencing. The solution I've found for this loud blast of air is to take the system out of auto mode by changing the fan speed manually. The auto indicator light should turn off. Then, do NOT turn off the climate control before you turn off the car. Just leave the climate control on. When you restart the car, the climate control will come back on in manual mode with the same settings you left it at. It won't do that crazy maxed-out settings thing anymore. At least not until the next time you turn the climate control off and back on again.

This isn't about the Escape but I imagine an Escape would be a similar process. https://youtu.be/0K9M7hZQTec

I was playing with the '24 Build & Price tool last night. I'm glad I got my '23 PHEV Premium in Atlas Blue while it was available. The feature I noticed isn't mentioned is the heated steering wheel. I wonder if it's just beneath mention? Or have they really eliminated it? But I went back and checked the 2023 B & P tool, and didn't see the heated steering wheel mentioned there either. Mine definitely has the feature though.

Here's a bizarre bug I found in the Sync 4 software. When I back out of my driveway the car is in Reverse. Then I point the nose downhill and switch to Neutral to coast 140 feet forward down to the stop sign. On the map, the blue arrow representing the car moves *backward* up the hill. The software is doing some kind of dead reckoning, and somehow interprets the motion of the car as being in the opposite direction. By the time I get to the stop sign, the software's estimate of the car's location is off by about 280 feet, and it remains that way for a little while, usually about 2 blocks, until the car seems to fix its position with GPS. If I switch into Neutral from Drive, the blue arrow on the map moves the direction the car is moving. It's only when I switch to Neutral from Reverse that the arrow moves opposite the direction the car is moving.

I have seen speed limit displayed in the HUD. But not always. I haven't figured out when it does and when it doesn't display. Thinking back, perhaps it only displays the speed limit when cruise control is enabled? I'm not sure. Another oddity I have experienced 3 times now: I'm traveling on the highway with cruise control enabled. Speed limit is 60 mph, maybe I have the cruise control set at 70 to keep up with traffic. All of a sudden, the car jams on the brakes. I look down, and for some reason, the car thinks the speed limit has changed to 45 mph. In all 3 cases, I am certain I did NOT pass any speed limit sign. The only commonality I can identify is that the places where it's happened were places that maybe 1-2 years ago were construction zones. They are no longer construction zones now, and any speed restriction that may have been in place previously for construction is no longer present. I don't know why the car would be picking up on long-defunct construction zone speed restrictions, unless they were somehow recorded in the mapping software. Anyone else experience anything like that? The sudden vigorous braking seems dangerous to me, when traffic is zooming along at 70 mph.

I found the Power Flow screen yesterday and watched it as I descended the two steep streets leaving home. I agree, it does not show any regen in Neutral. But at the same time, the power meter on the dash shows "negative and green," like it is regenerating. I find it disconcerting to get 2 different indications at the same time. I guess the power meter isn't displaying what I think it's displaying. I do like the power meter on the dash. At a glance I see how much power is currently being delivered by the battery and the gas engine simultaneously.

I was looking only at the power meter on the dashboard. I'll look at it in the Power Flow screen; I haven't even dug that screen out of the menus yet.

I tried it and it works! Putting the Escape PHEV in neutral (N) does in fact seem to disable the Grade Assist or Hill Descent mode. According to the power meter on the dashboard, it still regenerates into the battery. I tried it on the two steep streets near my house at 70% charge and 90% charge, and the gas engine did not come on in either circumstance. With the engine in drive (D), it would always come on on both streets at 90% charge, and sometimes on one of the streets at 70% charge. With the engine in neutral, the braking response was very controllable and smooth, and did not exhibit any of the weird touchiness and jerkiness that I've experienced in D between regen, gas engine, and regular brakes. Ford has more work to do here, IMHO. I consider this a viable workaround to the unusual design decision that, "Grade Assist should be enabled for around town driving." I didn't like limiting the battery to 70% charge, because a main reason for buying the car was to get significantly longer battery range than the C-Max, and 70% limit nixed that. Also, the 70% limit didn't always keep the gas engine off, whereas Neutral does seem to keep it off reliably, after a few days trying it out. It's a bit weird to shift an automatic transmission car, but I drove a stick shift my whole life before getting the C-Max, so I'm sure it will come back to me. Many thanks to GaryG for the suggestion. In the spirit of the original question Rangers09 asked, my wife and I are liking the Gear Shift knob less as we drive the car more. It's too easy in D to spin the knob 2 clicks clockwise (instead of CCW), and think the car's in reverse (R), when in fact it's still in D. Conversely, we've both shifted from R to D by turning it 2 clicks CCW, and then we're surprised to find ourselves in park (P) when we take our foot off the brake. It would be better if the knob had stops at the ends of travel and could only be turned to one of 4 positions, P R N and D. But the infinite-spinning nature of it makes it confusing; there's no tactile feedback to warn you've made a mistake.

The engine has come on in our Escape PHEV when coasting downhill with the battery charge as low as 60%. Usually we don't see the "Engine enabled for system performance" message or hear the engine run if the battery charge is about 70%. So it was a surprise to me one day when we hadn't charged overnight and had only 60% charge on the battery, when the engine came on. It was the same steep street in our neighborhood where it always happens. (I don't know how steep that street is, but I think of it as "San Francisco steep.") Also, speed doesn't make a difference. When I back out of my driveway, I start from a stop, take my foot off the brake, let it coast, no gas pedal, and the engine will come on at about 6 mph. It happens reliably with 80% charge on the battery. 6 mph and 80% charge, the engine comes on. Usually doesn't happen at the end of our driveway if only 70% charge. But limiting the charge to 70%, we get only 26 miles of range, not the advertised 37, which is a big bummer. There's no warmup period associated with this. From cold, the engine will run for a few seconds (5-15 seconds) then shut off again. I've considered the possibility that the system could be braking by closing the valves on the engine to create compression, without actually firing the cylinders. If I were designing engines instead of the job I do, I would certainly think that was worth trying. But I don't believe that's the situation. When I come to a dead stop, there's about a 1-second lag till the engine shuts off. That lag can't occur unless the cylinders are firing. GaryG, what does MG2 mean?

I did my experiment with Auto EV. It made no difference. I estimate my street is about a 10% grade, dropping about 14 feet from my driveway down the 140 feet to the stop sign. With a full charge on the battery, the gas engine started in Auto EV mode just the same way it does in EV Now mode. No change. The behavior of the accelerator is a lot different from the C-Max. The regen is a LOT stronger when you coast. The Escape PHEV seems to actually try to hold the car at a given speed via regen/engine braking. The C-Max would pick up speed coasting down a hill, just like any normal gas engine car. The Escape for some reason is tuned to hold its speed constant if it can. In order to actually coast like any other car, you have to keep your toe on the accelerator just the tiniest little bit to keep the regen from grabbing. And the braking is very finicky. When I'm driving down my street toward the stop sign, the Escape PHEV is doing its super-speed-holding thing trying to "coast at a constant speed," either through regen or by running the gas engine at high RPM. But things get dicey as I get near the stop sign and prepare to stop. The first thing that happens as I touch the brake pedal is that the regen cuts out. But the brakes aren't engaged yet, so all of a sudden the car is actually coasting free down a steep hill. It rapidly picks up speed and wants to shoot past the stop sign out into the intersection. If you're not expecting it, wow, you wind up stomping on the brake to keep the car under control. I've mashed the pedal and screeched the brakes a couple times, because the car unexpectedly shoots forward as I put my foot on the brake! Definitely a learning curve on this beast.

Hahaha, I find it really funny that they even admit the woofer is purposely ported outside: "Where traditional subwoofers require a separate enclosure, the innovative Externally Coupled Subwoofer (ECS) uses the outside space surrounding the vehicle as a bass enclosure. Being mounted to the sheet metal of the Ford Escape and vented directly to the outside air, we not only cut down on weight, but can strategically place the ECS to maximize space inside the Escape." As I said, the effect is that it sounds like you're listening to bass coming from someone else's car. It is in no way integrated with the rest of the audio, and as is usually true of listening to the bass from someone else's car, it's very muddy. Adjusting the available treble-mid-bass controls do nothing to make the bass sound better, all you can do is turn the bass down all the way so it's not quite as intrusive. Thanks for that link.