Ford Mach-E 2 Year Long Term Ownership Update + Road Trip!

This is my family's personal Ford Mustang Mach, a toaster, a blender, a characterless egg painted and an unusually deep shade of iconic silver, an example of how each

year

Ford chooses a color from the palette to execute with a Drastically superior quality to all others. paint schemes the quality of this paint rivals what you would see on something like a Mercedes S Class instead of these sad, shuddering Escapes I rented last week in Miami, my wife and I decided on this Maki we never referred to like Mustang after We tested an example early in 2021 and found it to be a lovely Runabout around town.

Ours is a premium

long

-range rear-drive version which in sunny California is exactly what you want if you're interested in how I think our Maki units compare. For a real Mustang we made a video on which we also made a video of our initial impressions and then our impressions of owning one, after a few months we are not sure if the problem is the tablet, the car or the phone, as well as a video with the much faster but not better GT variant, you can see those links in the video description. We took delivery of this car in March 2021 and it is a very early production example, one of the first hundreds built.

I will explain why. This is important later, but it's been two

year

s and over 16,000 miles on the Maki, so let's see how it goes. Zach and I are taking a

road

trip

from Los Angeles to Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, just over 400 miles each way. The folks at the hilariously named Mullet Arena have bought us a Skybox to see the

mach

ine in person, Bert Kreischer, and that's as good a reason as any to drive eight hours each way and risk the frustration of the charging public. Got back last night oh no way to make dinner welcome to your 40 leaving LA with a full load.

Based on experience, I can expect to get 290 miles if I drive at a speed I won't drive or about 230 miles at a speed I will. As we drove, we loaded up some podcasts and left La early to avoid the traffic in the city. This

trip

is not interesting except stopping to charge in the arena parking lot. There are fewer than five curves on this entire trip, giving us plenty of time to reflect on the advantages. and downsides to Ford's attempt to build a better Tesla, today's video is brought to you by Jegs, they've been around since 1960 and if you know anything about cars you'll have heard of Jegs and jegs.com.

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The spaces between the panels are very narrow. The slam is really solid. Everything feels very tight, very substantial, well put together and the materials inside have a very high quality feel and none of that has changed in 16,000 miles of

ownership

. In fact, for the most part my car looks as good as the day it rolled off the lot, the leather is barely noticeable. Any signs of wear on all the mats look good and the screen is remarkably resistant to fingerprints; In fact, you can only tell that the car has been used by looking at one specific spot, the track advance button on the steering wheel, although the rest of the interior looks fine.

New, the finish has completely worn off on this button, it is easily the most pressed button in the car, because the music is always better at the next station. Ford has

update

d Sync several times since we've had this car, the interface is gradually improving. every time and the standalone systems work great, we love the fact that you can in

term

ix AM FM into serious presets in a large grid that you can see all at once, we love that you can customize the home screen with the bits of information you you prefer and We love the simplicity of changing profiles from one driver to another.

We use normal keychains, not the phone as a key feature because the keychain is dead. It's incredibly reliable, but there has been one ongoing problem that Ford has struggled to solve effectively. play I love carplay. I use it all the time. I am an Apple phone user and therefore seamless integration with my car is very important. Also, in Los Angeles there is a huge network, there are practically infinite ways to get to any right place, it's really just a matter of where it is. Traffic isn't a disaster right now and that means I'm almost always trying to run to show me the best route through the city, so it's very important that I use it even when I know how to get where I'm going because there can always be some kind of disaster, but one out of ten times the car just won't connect to my phone.

Totally inexplicable, I have no idea why other times it will take five or ten minutes of driving for it to connect to my phone, if my wife. and I get in the car and we both have our iPhones, the car seems to randomly choose which phone to connect to even though there is a clear hierarchy set up in the car's MMI about which phone to look for first, it's very random and sometimes infuriating and of course , it always seems to happen when I really need it to work, like at the beginning of a

long

road

trip or when I'm going to have to make a bunch of calls in the car or when I really need ways to sort my traffic. situation for that particular Drive Angry, admittedly this is a lot of screen time for a problem, but if your car is going to be a computer, which this car basically is, we have to criticize it as a computer and as good as carplay is. when it works.

Makes me understand why Tesla Rivian and Lucid just don't bother and this isn't the only electronic problem of course in an EV, aren't they all electronic problems occasionally if the window was down and you rolled it up using the One? The touch function would reach the top and then bounce back down and you would have to manually hold the switch to go all the way up. We had to ask the dealer to reprogram it a couple of times, plus we had some problems. Sometimes with the Ford Pass app connected to the car, whether to show our charge level or to use the remote start feature, these issues are inconvenient and slightly annoying with a new car, but they have never stopped us from driving the car according to necessary and We have certainly never been stranded anywhere talking about driving.

I have very few complaints about how the Maki actually drives. It is incredibly quiet. It's soft. The regenerative braking is programmed beautifully. better in rear-drive variants than all-wheel drive, the ride is slightly unrefined compared to high-end luxury vehicles, but the Magnetic Ride shocks that come with the GT are too stiff for daily use and won't They are a preferred upgrade at this price. for our City Highway needs, not Canyons. I really couldn't ask for much more than the Machi from a dynamic perspective, except who programmed automatic emergency braking into this thing. It's been a problem with all the Monkeys I've driven, luckily it's not Phantom.

It brakes on the highway, but when maneuvering hard at low speeds, whether in traffic or a parking lot or even inside my shop, it brakes violently in a situation where I'm actually in control and need those two feet to maneuver. slowly and then once you hit the brakes, you hold them firmly without releasing them for two or three seconds, which seems like an eternity, and you disengage the throttle so you can't get the car out of that situation quickly. It has the potential to stop you. and freeze in a dangerous situation, you can't talk about an electric vehicle without talking about charging.

Fortunately, I am lucky enough to have a home with a spacious driveway and a level 2 charger. I also have this beautiful store here called Westside Collector Car Storage and we also have a level 2 charger because ninety percent of our driving It is within the city limits. We charge the Maki overnight about once a week. It's not a big deal, it barely registers on our electricity bill. It may not be the case for everyone, but I'm right. kind of person who has a car like this because it fits my current lifestyle. On a road trip we are going to have to deal with the public charging network.

In fact, to get from Los Angeles to Phoenix we're going to have to deal with that twice. Every way I have driven to Vegas San Diego Palm Springs San Francisco and charging has never been smooth in public so here we are about a third of the way to Phoenix let's see if this will be my first easy charging experience. Using the built-in GPS today instead of Waze or Google, which includes some route planning, it says we can get a quick charge here, as I predicted when I left the house this morning, a full charge indicated 300 miles of range, we're getting close to the charger after going. about 150 miles with 106 miles of range, so at the speed I intended to drive to make my life enjoyable, which may be above the legal speed limit, but certainly not outside of what is morally right In this state, the rank passes faster than you. use more power last time I was here there was a lucid air that is capable of charging at 350 kilowatts and I was very excited to use a 350 charger and get 350.

And that charger was delivering 75 kilowatts so I had to sit on this Walmart. For a lot longer than I actually found the ideal, hyper-fast, 350, he says, boy, that's so presumptuous. I have a Ford plug with this car which means I shouldn't have to do anything, the car is connected to my credit card. is connected to Electrify America, you should be able to plug everything in without doing anything else and that's it. I bet 10 bucks that doesn't happen. The maximum power of this charger has been temporarily reduced to improve service and upgrade. Just telling you I was last on this charger in May 2022 that same screen was on same screen great

update

this connector appears to be intact what are the chances of this working first plug in first attempt to connect the locking mechanism of the vehicle has worked.

The thing is, people talk about range anxiety, it's not range anxiety. I can accurately predict my range based on how I drive. The gauges are accurate. My brain works. I know how far I have to go. It's not range anxiety, it's infrastructure anxiety. it's when I get to the place I need to go I'll be able to refill the tank and that's a matter of shifting priorities out of range which means we need infinitely larger batteries for the infrastructure i.e. we need reliable reliable ways to charge the batteries that we have is not a range anxiety, it is an anxiety about the infrastructure, it was connected, hey, right now it is delivering 81 kilowatts, the table that the car can handle 150, the charger says up to 350, but what is actually delivering is 81, it's on delivery, I'm just saying that, but it's going to Electrify America I would consider this a successful charging attempt and I'll say it worked on the first try, so yeah, but we're going to have to be on this charger on twice as long as we thought we were going to have. be on this charger, so okay, we've been here for 35 minutes, we're now at 86 percent charge, we've added 46 to our charge, which is less than the charger could deliver, but more than we need .

Now we have 220 miles, 225 miles of range and we only have 120 miles to go to our next destination. The final destination in Tempe, Arizona, is 260 miles, so even if we were to sit here until the car was one hundred percent full, then we would have to drive very conservatively for the next five hours, so this one was going tobe a two-stop trip pretty much no matter what Ford is very proud of its Blue Cruise technology, a hands-free Level 2 advanced cruise control that, under some operational design mastery, allows you to take your hands off the wheel. Ford regularly makes 3D maps of well-marked divided roads where this technology can be enabled and the car tells me when I've entered said area and can, in theory, be used on a long highway drive across the road.

In a desert like this, you should be able to use the Blue Cruiser about 95 percent of the way, but the reality is that yes, the Blue Cruiser works when the road is straight, clearly divided, and well marked, like Highway 10 that crosses the western part of Arizona as we are now I'm using it hands free it indicates it on the screen as such and it can handle this task very well but it is surprisingly inept at handling curves and I'm not talking about making turns or even a mountain road Winding, even gently curving sweepers on the highway can make this thing ping pong back and forth, and it's actually a little stressful in a lot of ways because I can't do anything but monitor the system while I'm on it.

Using it, you could also just be driving and using Ford's excellent adaptive cruise control. You can't check Instagram or read a book or completely unplug. You have to be alert and ready to take control. Now Mercedes has their new system which is a level three system and in certain cases mainly bumper to bumper at low speed traffic you can get distracted, read Instagram or read a book and Mercedes will take responsibility for what happens to the car when is activated. They are the first to commercialize that technology. This works just sometimes here we are. Arizona Quartzite Electrifies America.

We have Love's Travel Stop. 137 miles to reach our hotel in Phoenix 78 miles of range in the car. I fired up a 350 charger, but let's see if I can get all the juice out of this one. Good Vibes Good Vibes, what plugs into the vehicle and then? it said reconnecting to vehicle plug and charge is not recognized so plug and charge was a mistake however I have the app and here we are this is number three oh three swipe to start charging and process my payments yeah , loading start error see that's what we're talking about with this like a NES oh I just heard him jingling the lock so that's good he said reconnect the vehicle that's not good like that just this It shouldn't be a thing, maybe it's nothing because oh still look it says reconnect vehicle but it doesn't it has to connect to the car before anything else happens okay now I'm on the same screen as before, now I'm back on the app, when I swipe the initial load it says start loading. wait, we've gotten further than before we started charging Welcome Matt, okay, so you've acknowledged that Matt is here, charging started, it only took two tries, I think it's 118 kilowatts, we'll make it to Phoenix, oh foreign destination of migration.

Air Conditioners is the fifth most populous city in the US, possibly because it has one of the most sexually active student bodies in the country. We arrived at our hotel with over 90 miles remaining, which averages, as predicted, about 240 miles per charge on this highway. trip driving at a pace we consider adequate, there's really a lot to like about this car, it's roomy front and rear, comfortable, as fast as you'd need it to be, to be reliable by EV standards and the fit and feel finish, apart from the The jump button is irreproachable. This is a good car.

It's been really great. There have been some problems that we have gone over in this video. There were a couple of recalls where I took the car in and spent a few days at the dealership to get it. It worked, there was an engine recall that didn't affect me personally, they had to replace the glue on the panoramic glass roof because it could get obscene, and other than them doing the work for a day or two, it hasn't affected me now. The particular car was part of a very early batch of 2021 model year cars, the first few hundred cars delivered, and as such had a unique set of teething issues, something that, in speaking with other members of the Maki community, most cars new, 2022 and 2023 models. their cars don't have those problems, so I'm sure that whatever those problems were with my initial '21 version, they have mostly been fixed and I have personally recommended these cars to some of my friends , who have informed me that they enjoy them.

If you ask me, I would buy another one. It has worked for me and my family. Now we are here in the arena. We found a charger in the garage because after all we have to get home after this. Let's go see some Chrysler birds. We at TST. Don't think you need to give up your gas car if you don't want to own a DVS with giant batteries you're not going to save the planet, you would have a bigger impact if you gave up meat. TST wants you to drive the car that makes you happy, and while it's not replacing my Boxster with the Fizz or my 35-year-old Lamborghini for the wow factor, this is an everyday car that runs better than most gas cars. while sitting in Los Angeles traffic or driving a couple hundred yards at light-to-light time, as we've demonstrated in this video, it's acceptable, if not perfect, for an occasional road trip.

It's a refrigerator, it makes my life easier without asking too much in return and in that way the Maki is like my old friend Carl. Ruiz would say an egg but a good egg and always remember to fight for your tickets use the code tst10 in the off the Record app available in the Android and iOS store or visit offtherecord.com TST