Mustang Mach E | The Result of Forcing EVs

It's been about 2 years since we drove the Mustang Maki, so in this video we'll talk about some of its growing pains, what it is and isn't, and of course, why there's been reduced demand for electric cars like this. recent enough that many manufacturers and investors are quite concerned about this, we're going to go to the workshop, we're going to take this for a quick walk-through and then a recap, so let's get started now, there have been some subtle tweaks to the Machi since was released, so what you're doing is you're taking the front end off of some of your existing SUVs and using it here for an electric architecture, so the center plane of this car is a battery pack that you've added options to.

For an electric motor in the rear and all-wheel drive, you have the standard range model and you have the extended range model. They now use two separate types of mass battery chemistry for the long range versus the short range, the short range battery pack. Now its chemistry has been changed to LFP, which is a lithium phosphate battery, it does not contain nickel or cobalt. It has a few different advantages and disadvantages that I'll cover in a minute. Catl still makes it. It's a Chinese battery pack and Ford had initially invested or allocated billions of dollars to build their battery plant in the United States so they could be built here take advantage of the tax credits, blah blah blah, that's not happening now, They're putting it off because, well, people aren't buying electric cars.

As you anticipated, the Mach E from its first year to its second year has now dropped approximately 21% in sales and you can also look at other models and there is a drop across the board, we're not going to get into that now, but the point en Ford was looking at how to reduce costs and that's why they switched to this battery chemistry which, to be fair, other brands have done like Tesla to reduce the cost of their entry level products. Now the benefit of the lfp is again, it is more real. there for fleet customers because when you don't have nickel-cobalt, one of the things it allows you to do is charge 100% more frequently without battery degradation, whereas the lithium-ion counterparts are more sensitive to that, so you typically want to charge it to 80%, so what that does is that the battery life is better for the customers in your fleet.

You don't have to worry about that, but what it does do is it's slower and not capable of generating the full power that it is. The lower size of the battery pack I don't think they think customers would care that much, but again , is more for their fleet customers than performance customers. Now there have been some issues with just its long range version and it is generally reserved for higher performance. uh, the GT models, the all-wheel drive models, which is what we have here and initially, the problems with the contactors that are on a control board inside the battery pack and these contactors, what are actually there, are there to disconnect and activate the inverter. or the electric motors to the battery, so a lot of pre-checking is done and you see that X, Y and Z are working, so you connect the contactors for the positive and negative terminals in order and Weber Automotive Kelly , who is the professor, teacher, uh, they do an amazing job of taking down a lot of modern equipment and we've seen this in the past and we've shown pictures and if you're a technician or someone who wants to learn about engineering and how to take things apart , they do one of the best jobs or he does one of the best jobs on the Internet of showing how these parts work and how to repair them, so that's what I'm going to talk about a little bit.

Bit of that, so these contactors, what happens is, since Ford specified what is apparently the same part on the lower battery pack versus the extended range, they didn't really account for the fact that more heat would be generated via DC fast charging. in a larger battery pack and more heat generated by the current passing through these contactors due to an extended or harder core on the GT models, so as it generates more heat it causes a short circuit on the board circuit or generates sufficient heat in the contactors where they are soldered. open or closed, so what happens is that if it is welded closed when you are driving, the car will run fine, but when you turn the car off and restart it, if those contactors are in a closed state, well, all these pre-checks will be done.

Okay, there's a problem and it won't start and it stalls and you have to take it to a dealer. They have to put him in an elevator. They literally have to lower the battery pack. Lower the battery pack. Remove the control board. Change it. and then reseal the battery and there's a whole procedure to do all of this, it's a lot of work, so Ford tried to fix it with a software recall, which meant changing the amount of voltage during fast charging . DC fast charging, monitor that and slow down. to reduce the heat and then reduce the heat generated by this their right foot so that they reduced the power outage so that the thermal burden would not fall on the contractors essentially, so that did not work for all the cars probably because they already created the problem and After the software update, these cars already suffered mechanical damage, so now they are doing a complete recall of essentially like 30,000 cars that have to come to the dealership to replace this control unit that is inside the battery pack and, If you know what I mean, this is the worst case scenario for a car like this because you are trying to make your electric car like the Flagship Mustang and now you have dealers who probably don't have much experience in this.

Doing this enormous amount of work is essentially worse than having the engine shut down and then you're worried about whether they're going to put it back together correctly, whether they're going to tighten the parts properly, whether they're going to keep their hands clean and all the contactors and everything. the electrical parts inside this anyway, that's what you're going through in a first-generation Mustang, the philosophy, the other philosophy here is that this is an interesting car because clearly the Ford executives within Ford made a decision based in that it was an emergency to make an electric car now and there was a clear division and I think it can be seen in marketing.

I heard him talking to the people inside because there was a clear division because they were not unified in making a Mustang EV, it was a marketing exercise. It was a response to the market, we need one now or we will be left behind, whatever the pressures, by having a brand with engineers and the people behind it who didn't particularly want to make a Mustang EV let alone a crossover or an SUV version, you can see it everywhere, this reactive mentality of building a car not out of passion because they didn't want to be late to the game or they didn't want to be sitting on the sidelines with Tesla.

Also, it wasn't smart and clearly, in hindsight, we're going to see more and more of that and the first generation of these products are going to suffer, customers are going to suffer when they get caught up with some of these chicken problems. that should have been fixed but again as a customer I think people are getting smart, they don't want to spend 50k+ on an experiment and if you are one of those people I would be deeply surprised if someone stopped selling a Mustang Maki and he said, "Oh, wow, I'm going to miss that car." I will always think about it.

This thing was amazing and I don't think it's one of those cars that's going to work. that and with that name, that Legacy brand, it's a big mistake to do that and not have people walk away feeling like it's a special vehicle, but Jack and I are going to take this for a quick ride and talk about some of the pros and cons. Of the car, what I will say is that it is a kind of driving

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ine that accelerates and aligns the road as one. There is definitely more responsive acceleration and steering in this mode.

I don't disagree with you, Mark, and when I put it in activation mode, Mark fine. It's more of a Balan drive for everyday fun and then a whisper, well it's more of a smooth, quiet ride, smoother acceleration and steering the best mode for slippery conditions. I don't disagree. Mark every time I'm in this car, it's clearly slippery conditions, oh. yeah ok so let's talk about no one cares about this car oh maybe the owners are worried about what's going to happen to it and if the resale value is going to be erased as more discounts come in ok now you can buy this. you can buy the first ones for around 20 years, low 30s, not so low, why is there nothing wrong with Jack?

There are no problems with this vehicle, it's perfect in every way, it's a Mustang, okay, so let's be more constructive, right? I don't blame why people wanted to jump on the bandwagon of an early release of this, but when you really look at it from the screen here, the technology, the drivability, there's nothing really wrong with it, it's a very average car, so why would you buy this at least in North America or, sorry, the United States? Our argument in the off-camera workshop was that there's no compelling reason to spend more money than an internal combustion counterpart in the SUV space. really at this price at this price and they're marketing, let me tell you what their marketing says, the GT is faster than a Macon Turbo S and it's faster than certain iterations of the 911 in a straight line, so if you're not buying into the marketing of this

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and the speed and everything that all electric cars are fast and in a straight line, what does this do that the others don't, why would you spend more money on it if it were a $30,000 car, right? and it offered this level of experience for 30 grand and you were buying this with a sporty Bronco or an escape, you have a very strong argument for why you would buy an electric vehicle.

The problem is when you play in the premium category. Of those cars have premium transmissions, yes, and the benefit and refinement of the EV element of the transmissions is not very substantial, at least for me at this price, and it is difficult to make a strong argument for this car and in the truck . The space where you bring a lightning doesn't sell particularly well and the lightning is not a rivano, right, the people who buy F-150s buy them for traditional truck purposes or the rivano and it seems to be the cyber truck, they are style vehicles of life, basically in its entirety, that it is not a better truck than a traditional F-150 in a roundabout way.

I know what you mean and I think to answer the original question is that the brands are trying to figure out why there is no interest in these EVS that are too expensive and what I just said is that you have 70,000 different versions of the F-150 and Lightning, other than having electric propulsion, doesn't do anything particularly better than the regular F-150, it can't tow as much, it won't be as off. highway capable in a lot of conditions and it's not functionally that good every day because you have range anxiety in a world we're in where you don't have the cargo net so to be honest you're going to go with a regular.

You know you can use the F-150 every day and you never have to think about the battery part and I don't think everyone cares about battery propulsion, it's not the end of the world so this is the same problem unless it's premium. SUV in a premium SUV, unless you make it with better range than its gasoline counterparts, make it more convenient to charge everywhere and make it significantly cheaper or better than its internal combustion counterparts, it doesn't make sense. to choose this because our Ice ER cars there is still a better option, yes, again, if this car was, you know, a bronos Sport price in that high price range, between 20 and 30 years old, I could forgive a lot of this, you might even forgive all recalls.

I think that's the other element of this. I have to imagine that buyer confidence has been undermined in this car, particularly in many of these first generation cars, all the initial paint jobs, yes, and I think some of this, this screen like the propulsion sounds all that. They're trying to make it different, they're gimmicks that people just don't care about and they're certainly not going to pay more money for areas where you're subsidized to do it or forced to do it. to do it right it's a very difficult task to get someone out of something like a Q5 or an that the division in the United States is that many states see electric cars as they see forced immunization, you know, you are not going to impose an electric car on me like you, it has become a political issue and it is not a political issue for us, it's like I don't want people to spend their money on a car that is totally disposable, that's more like what it is, show me it's nothing more than a first generation car that's stuck around. power, would invest or offer something over its internal counterpart, so Mark, with that,let's go to the end of this video sir all right final thoughts on the Mustang Mach e and clearly anything you want to know about this car more so we did it in our original video but it's a philosophy talk about some of the problems with first generation electric cars and I know we beat that issue to death, there are only so many times you can say, well, you know, wait until the next generation, I mean, people understand that with electronics and phones and all that, the next thing will probably be better and this is a perfect example and it's not that there's anything particularly wrong with Maki, it's just that it takes away from the branding and the marketing and everything.

Besides that, it's a pretty noble first attempt, you can tell that the people behind the car put a lot of effort into it to make it the best they could put on the market, given the limitations of a corporate culture that is obsessed with copy and paste. what everyone else is doing isn't enough and you see it even more when you look at the technology in cars like this, it's technology for the sake of being an electric car for the sake of it, not because you're breaking something. new ground, I was literally there to say, oh, we have to have an electric car and you know we're going to figure out how to manipulate it where people are going to buy it and again that's not enough and it's not enough when the prices of everything are at a stratospheric level where people can't afford it, normal people can't afford it and Ford is basically now stuck in the one car game and then the trucks keep them afloat, so again it's about the direction of the company, it's This is a corporate issue.

In culture there are many factors, but at the end of the day you are making cars for customers and all brands would like us to follow the customers. Now there are a lot of other people doing the same thing and I think there definitely needs to be a rethink of this whole structure and the industry thanks for watching. See you in the next video.