Mustang Mach-E: My thoughts after 18 Months!

Hello everyone welcome back to the channel so we are here with my Mustang ma again and it's time for an 18 month update so there's a lot to talk about let's get into it so my Mustang Mai is a 2022. I bought it in June 2022 so I've had it for about 18

months

and it's the standard range four wheel drive package with premium trim so after 18

months

this is how I feel about the doors . I think the style looks great. I understand why they made that decision. um they're trying to get a little more range out of it, that gives the car this nice sleek look.

I guess I have a hard time believing they are making a significant amount off that considering how big the mirror is when everything works well the doors open great um the presenter is there um so if you push in you can't get your fingers stuck in the door um so you push the door open that far and then you grab the handle to open it the rest of the way the presenter retracts and Now that the doors open, there is a physical button that actually physically moves to open the door, but the lock button It's a capacitive button, meaning you don't actually physically press it, it's just a capacitive touch button, so it should be able to detect your finger. there it doesn't always work, you can see even right now it doesn't work and now the door unlock doesn't work which probably means the app crashed on my phone so now I have the physical key.

I'll put it in my pocket. The doors work well. when you use the physical key when I first bought the car even the physical key was a little finicky but over the last year I have never had any problems with the physical key the doors always open and always close the capacitive part of the button is still not ideal, there are times when my finger is wet or the car is wet or because this little emblem on the lock is slightly raised from the plastic. I don't think that part is touch sensitive so it's almost better to touch just below the lock your finger has more contact there with the button I think they look really good um I think the system is really well thought out frankly just I miss a standard door handle, it's much simpler, there's much less that can go wrong I still really like the interior of the Mai, you know?

I think they've struck a good balance between making it look elegant and a little futuristic but still keeping it simple. You know, compared to other electric vehicles, Tesla's interior is much more. Bare Bones, especially the model 3 and model y, you only have the center screen, uh, you don't have any kind of gauge cluster screen, so the Maki does have the gauge cluster screen, you have physical vents here, like this You're not using the screen all the time just to adjust which way the air is blowing. You can also manually close the vents. The seats are really nice.

They seem to wear quite well. I've had a few other people sit in them. the car and that's usually one of the things they comment on is oh wow, these seats are really nice, you know, they're comfortable enough, you know, some of the older leathers I felt were very stiff, my old Mustang leather was very hard and stiff where it is this one is a lot softer um but it's still pretty breathable um it's still easy to clean if you spill on it um you can see on the seat, you know there's some kind of creases and things from just getting in and out all of them. days, some kind of wear on the seat that you might be able to remove.

I also have the Bang 10 speaker sound system and Olicon, uh, the design looks great, it has this really nice mesh design, uh. It integrates nicely here into the dash like a sound bar. It looks excellent. The sound quality is fine. The mids and highs are really good. Nice soundstage. We are relying on the subwoofer in the rear, which doesn't seem like it will be enough. These side speakers down here look like they could use a little more bass coming out of them to make it sound a little fuller in the back seat. it gets pretty used to it with my family I still really like the glass roof on this one um definitely the back seats are the place to really enjoy it, you know, from the front seat since you're looking out the front window most of the time. and I know it doesn't really start up here, you know where your head is, you know you have to look up to really see it, you definitely get some extra light here, a little bit more headroom, so it's definitely nice, but really the back.

The seat is where you'll enjoy it the most on the outside of the car, in the front, there's two chips, two or three little rock chips right on the plastic part of the bumper, so the paint chipped off there, um, but I No. I think I've had some paint chipping on any of the metal parts of the car, which is cool, there's also a small plastic fender piece in front of the rear tire, where it's secured with some sort of metal screw and then a plastic. fastener for the second attachment point and that plastic piece is broken.

I think I hit a box or something on the interstate at one point and that broke, but all the other plastic trim, you know, around the car on the mirrors um on the wheels um, all of that has been wearing just fine. . I don't do anything special with it, just you know, try to keep it clean. I also say that the build quality of this car is really good, you know, if you look at any of the Tesla reviews a lot of people like to talk about the gaps in the panels, you know, for now. Everything seems to fit and finish well.

The only exception is the passenger side driver's door. This piece does not line up exactly with this part. of the fender is a little higher than where the door is and there's a little bit of width here, you really only notice it if you really look at it and from certain angles you can't even tell it's there, you know the brakes. It seems fine, obviously you don't need to use the brakes much as you're using the regenerative braking with the electric motors most of the time, the friction brakes are really there if you're decelerating at a normal pace. in the last two miles per hour, the friction brakes come on, or if you're doing any kind of sudden braking, obviously the friction brakes are going to be used, you know you haven't had any problems there, the tires seem to be worn out.

Well, I want to talk about winter driving with the Mai, so the Mai has some features and things that I hadn't really considered. When I was thinking about winter driving, you know, I thought a little more about all-wheel drive. You know, an SUV-style platform compared to a standard Mustang coupe sports car. You know, it seemed like, oh yeah, this will be so much better in the snow. Yes, it's better in the snow than a standard Mustang, with all-wheel drive being the biggest. part of that, but there are also some things I didn't really know and it's not exactly perfect in the snow, so the first thing you know, maybe a little obvious, are the tires, so the Maki comes with some Michelin tires to all seasons with great grip. in the wet, you know, obviously it's completely fine in the summer, uh, in mud situations, okay, a little bit of snow, it's pretty okay, but when the snow gets compacted and hard or you start dealing with any kind of ice, tires really don't. they have great grip and you end up sliding quite a bit and there are a couple of other factors on top of that, they are thinner tires trying to optimize range, they are low rolling resistance tires so naturally you know they are trying to have less friction as they roll which is not good for slippery surfaces and ice and being an all season tire they are not ideal, you know, in those colder temperatures, so all those factors together, also consider the weight del mai, you already know this.

It's a heavy car, it doesn't really feel like a heavy car, you know when you're in the summer driving because it's got great torque, it's got good power, so you know you don't really notice the weight as much as the weight. down, so even the handling feels decent, but when you're trying to stop on a slippery surface it's not great. Plus, it has all-wheel drive, which helps a lot when you're trying to get going. You know, my old Mustang GT. I had snow tires on that car, um, and in some cases I needed them if I was going to go up any kind of hill, the four-wheel drive, the all-wheel drive on the mayo, it's great, I don't have that problem, it gets going, but when it comes time to stop, it's really no different than the others, so keep that in mind.

Also something scary I discovered last winter was that when I parked in my driveway, the driveway was kind of icy and had a slight incline, in fact, Mai slid into my street and I thought, wow, that's never happened. happened to any other car I've had in the driveway in winter, what's the problem with that? So I experimented with it a little bit and realized that the front wheels were actually spinning while sliding down the street and the rear wheels were locked and sliding like skis on the back, so what's going on there? is the The front engine does not have any type of parking brake or parking lock, so the front wheel is only free wheel even though it is an all-wheel drive model, to know if the front wheels could be locked when it was in the car. a little more experimentation, like if you just put your foot on the brake, you know, now brakes are applied to all four wheels, you know, the car stops sliding, so having two more friction points there in the front, you know, It made a big difference to keep it. slide, but when you're out of the car you're only relying on two points of friction at the rear to keep it from sliding, and as I already mentioned, these tires are not good on icy surfaces, the last thing I do when driving in winter.

Now I will mention that, like I said, it's two motors with all-wheel drive, but the rear motor is the larger motor and in some cases, if you're turning and you hit the accelerator suddenly, you can get the rear. slide pretty far and it can be fun if you're trying to do that or there's no one around or whatever, but if you're turning a corner or something, just be careful, you know, take it easy. throttle there because that big engine will kick the rear end, no problem, now it's funny because this car has the name Mustang and that's exactly what a rear wheel drive Mustang would do, so that's cool, it has that feature too.

The rear motor on the back is larger, which means that when you're doing any type of regenerative braking and you're decelerating using the electric motors, you know they're helping you brake and recharging the battery instead of the friction brakes, the rear engine brakes more. than the front engine and so you know when there are dry surfaces or whatever, that doesn't matter, that's great, but on icy surfaces that slow down with regeneration, I have made the rear end slide a little, which is a bit disconcerting because you know when the rear end slides and you're accelerating, you know it's a little more predictable, you're a little more used to that, especially if you drive rear-wheel drive cars, but when you're slowing down you're not really expecting it on your part. rear end to slide, you're expecting more like your wheels are locking up or something, but the rear end moves a little when you're braking, that's not a great feeling.

I really think Ford should add some kind of snow mode for this, they could definitely alleviate some of that, with just a software update, do more regen on the front engine or just reduce the regen on the rear engine and hell, just make more friction brakes in the winter, I mean. the range has already been reduced by the heater running uh you know the battery is cold I haven't run out or anything like that um and the stability control I think will kick in there at some point it will also apply ABS even in regeneration mode.

I'll do the friction brakes to give you some ABS, but not a great feel, so it would be great if that could be changed. Well, speaking of efficiency and trips on the car, the car has 13,000M on it and I bought it with only about 20 miles on it, so I kept Trip 2 that entire time. I haven't restarted it. Let me show you a ride first, although this is the last 2,000 miles approximately 84 hours. You can see this. the average says 2.6 thousand per kilowatt hour and then you can see where the energy has gone mainly by driving but still using quite a bit of weather.

It's been cold, you know, this has been probably from late November to January, a lot now. of cold weather driving there this number, the efficiency number and then what my driving numbers are like. I'm a little skeptical about how well it works and if it's really a correct number, you can see we've been sitting here, you know. They are never that bad,so I think this rounding works incorrectly. I've also seen this number jump up and down and then let's go to the second shot and there's another rounding issue on this as well. The display so you can see this says 3,182 thousand, but it's actually because the trip can't go over 99,999 miles, so once I hit 10,000 thousand on this trip, it went back to zero.

Now the hours work correctly, you can see 489 hours, that's it. the amount of time I have spent in the car since I bought it. I'll do some math here and figure out what that average speed is over 13,000 mil, but it obviously didn't take me 489 hours. 3000 thousand, that would be really bad, but you can see that the efficiency number is the same and you can see that the little graph here doesn't really change at all between these, so I'm not totally convinced that this number is correct for all my way of driving. I don't think it's too far away either.

I think a good rule of thumb is probably a little air conditioning when driving on the highway. looking at two high to three low depending on your speed and good weather and then on an interstate in bad weather you're probably looking at two high to two low and then add like a half mile per kilowatt hour if you're in the city to those numbers , so you know, overall, I think probably average is something that's not too far from that. um, you know, I would like to reset this trip now, especially with this change. I think it's time, so here goes nothing.

There it goes and we'll revisit this in a future video. I'd like to see how it ends. I'm going to leave this other trip so we can use it as a comparison, so talking. over the center screen, I still really like the physical knob here, the default is mostly your volume and I really like that now because I did an update in the last 6 months or so, where not only is it your volume, but it will also allow you to change your weather options, so let's say you want to change the temperature, if you click on the temperature, now you can adjust the temperature with the knob, which is quite cool, even the center of the knob becomes more red or more blue depending on the temperature um, it also works for the fan speed, for example, uh, you can adjust it up or down, uh, heated seats, you can adjust them on all three settings, um, so it's very useful, good to see. do a little more with the knob that's there.

A note about the climate controls is that you will see this button for the air conditioning. You know it's pretty standard in any car, but in an electric car, when you're using the heater, you know that heat is a byproduct of the engine in a standard combustion engine. In a car, but not in an electric vehicle, you actually have to run some kind of electric heat or heat pump or something, so there's a separate button here that allows you to turn on the electric heat, which makes sense. , my only complaint here is I wish this heat button or at least some indication of whether the heater is on or not was actually more on the home page here somewhere maybe next to the air conditioner with a little light when it's on or not in the summer, you know, on a night where it's really cool or spring in the morning maybe it's 50 or 60° you don't feel like you totally need the heat, you just want some air to flow well if your Climate is set to 72 in the car, it will automatically enable the heat, which will use some extra battery.

You know, in the city it's not a big deal, but if you're on a road trip or something, and you just want to turn on your fan to get a little bit of air in here and you have it set to 72, it will actually run the heater a bit now, it probably isn't using a ton of power, but when you're trying to really stretch your battery on a road trip, it would. It would be nice to know, hey, my heater is on and I can override it and turn it off. From the home page, obviously, you can go in here and turn it off, but it's not as obvious in that same update.

Ford also added this. button here that allows you to automatically activate the car cameras. I really love the 360 ​​camera. um, you know, there's obviously no camera on top of the car. It is using images from the side mirrors, the rear and front cameras, but it is very useful when You are also parking the ambient lighting here, it looks very good, you can change different colors, you can also adjust the brightness and control that on the screen there is no option to create a custom color, although there are some nice presets here and it looks really. Well you also have some lighting here in the center, under the armrest, under the tray down here, everything looks great, however there is no lighting on the door sill plates, my old Mustang used to light them up too , whatever the color. would be placed inside, so talking about the gauge cluster display.

I really like having this. You know it's right behind the wheel so you know all your needs are here. You know you have the battery percentage within your reach. But I wish there was even more information. here and I wish it was customizable or at least had some preset options, that's how it looks all the time. I'd also like to see more kind of nerdy EV type information, like, what's my charging rate in kilowatts, what's my power? car output, like how much power the car is using right now, even if you could just page up or something here, just to go to a different preset page, that would be cool, you'll get turn BYT direction information here, but you can You don't see what song is playing, you can't see a map of where you're going, it's almost too basic.

I mean, it's a super nice color screen, you know, here and it looks like they could do more with this, huh. I wonder if over time you know that Ford has really gone to great lengths to support Android Auto and Apple CarPlay and a lot of times that's what people use on this top half of the screen. You know those systems that work very well? and Apple has shown some views where they'll also autoplay your speedometer and all you know, gauge cluster display, so I'm wondering if Forge is just waiting to be able to enable that and not going to mess with nothing. otherwise we'll have to see, I also want to mention the buttons and the physical buttons, especially for the rear trunk, here, the rear hatch, this open and close button, that's very useful, but let's say you're about to go out of the car. you turn off the car, this screen will turn off or you know, it will show some messages or whatever and now the button for the rear hatch is gone, so if you say okay, I want it back, you know, give it back to me is Like no, no, it's okay. here it is, but if you had turned off the car and opened the door at the same time, now the screen goes into off mode and then it's gone, so there are some physical buttons here for the headlights. for screen brightness, traction control, maximum defrost, any of those buttons it would be nice to replace them with a button for the rear hatch because there are many times when I get out of the car, I open the door before clicking on the screen and then really the only other option is to use the phone keychain or the physical button on the back of the car, so there are other options, but they are all much less convenient than if you could just press a button here. let's talk about the front trunk, we use this for a variety of different things, probably my favorite thing that fits really well here is camp chairs.

For some reason, it fits perfectly. There is a camp chair in different sizes here, but obviously you can get four camp chairs. There, no problem, you have a little more space on top and you'll notice that it also has a rubber seal around it so you know that water won't get in here. You can also get a small canvas bag. bag there 35 inches across 15 inches 14 and 1/2 to here 16 inches but that's pretty generous um you know this kind of crack here is about 9 inches there's also a drain plug in there that's good if you can do This is like a cooler and it will slowly drain out of there.

I actually prefer to use it for muddy things, like hiking boots or something, and if some mud or whatever gets in, you can wipe it off. or hose it off so you don't end up using the frunk regularly. I enjoy having it, especially for any type of trip, whether it's a day trip or some type of road trip, it's nice to have. the extra storage space, um, it's also nice to have this area that can get dirty, it won't get stained, you know, the carpet or whatever inside the car. I've been to Home Depot a few times and I'm buying mulch or sand or something like that and a fertilizer and just throwing a bag or two in here and not having that end up somewhere in the car, that's really nice.

This is also where the 12 volt battery lives. You can't easily jump into another car with this car, um if you remove this panel, you could have access to the 12 volt battery to connect jumper cables, but it's not as simple as it is in a standard car. Large cargo space. You have a little space under the floor. I could even lower the floor a little if you wanted a little more height. I've got my ice scraper underneath, there's a little area for the charging cable, there's a 12 volt outlet back here, there's a subwoofer back here, and lastly, you also have this guy. of cargo privacy cover that you can easily install and remove, you can also throw it under, you know, the floor in the back, if you want to take it out, it's good if you're trying to hide some things back there.

You can get away with throwing a coat or two on top, but it's pretty flimsy, it's not designed to have any weight on it and you have to be careful too, just for example, you can see it here. It rubs on that, so if you have something high back there, the cargo cover is going to crash into that, so that's not ideal. I also want to mention the Ford Pass smartphone app, which you use on your phone with the car. I know, I think, for a general application, I think it's pretty good. There are definitely a lot of great features.

Probably my favorite feature is the remote start and it doesn't rely on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for that, you know, over cellular. to plug it into the car so you can start it from wherever you are in the world, but more realistically, I like to use it when I'm in the office, my car is in the parking lot, it's winter, you know? When I leave my desk or whatever, I can start the car remotely and the car can be running for several minutes before I get there and warm up, so that feature is really nice. The app looks like there is a lot of potential.

It can generate a lot. Of the updates add a lot of features to this app, especially if you compare it to other apps like the Tesla app for example, there really aren't any options to set the climate controls you want. The car you know discovers what you want. thinks you want and so far it has been correct every time it always turns on the heat for me in the winter turns on the air conditioning in the summer so it does it right the cabin reaches the temperature you want but it would be nice if I had more information on the exact settings on that, um, the app has some useful things, it will show you when there are software updates, it will show you when there are vehicle alerts, um, and you can unlock, lock the car, you can open the front and back. trunk you can open windows um and that all works pretty well really my only complaint is that it's a little limited it seems like you can do a lot more and the app crashes sometimes which means if you're using the phone as a key that that app has to be open and running for the phone to work as a key, you know, sometimes the car will be like "Hey, key not detected" or if you're trying to unlock the car, you know, just press the button on the door if the app crashes, you're lucky until you take out your phone and restart the app, so I've always had a phone with a key that finally works, or works, or finally works fine.

I think that's it for 18. One month update I hope you found this helpful. One topic we don't cover in much detail is freight costs. We talk about efficiency, but not so much about the cost of that. So I'm going to make a video about that. So subscribe if you want to see it. Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time.