Good on them. It's good to see car manufacturers are still taking their responsibility of delivering an actually correctly functioning car seriously.
In the tech world we would have artificially limited the power throughput, providing no information or remedy to the customer. This seems like the right move.
While you can argue that Ford should have specced the bar correctly to start out with, I'm happy to see that this is the response. Get it back to a technician, and swap out the part, at no cost to the customer.
Good on them? Yes, let’s give them a pass for even allowing this car to be shipped as is. It’s a freaking mustang, and they never floored it in any of their tests during development of the car? Nobody ever sat down with pencil and paper and did the math on the extreme conditions on what would happen if the max power was requested? No where in the computer code for throttle control has a software limiter to prevent surge requests like this?
Just seems like shit design process to me, it sure, let’s pat them in the back for doing a mea culpa
It would be interesting to hear the real story here. These cars tend to have artificial power restrictions for reliability.
It is possible that they did test it, but there were late software changes to reduce the power restrictions for marketing reasons. And maybe things weren't retested as much as they should be?
It could be as simple as them doing the engineering analysis, finding the potential problem, and then being overridden because someone thought it wouldn't happen in the real world.
Could be, but if the marketing department can push spec change past tested conditions on critical safety components without retesting then there's an organizational/cultural lapse running very deep.
We're talking about the relay that turns off high voltage in accidents and can weld itself in a permanent "on" state if people drive their sports car too sporty.
I remember when Top Gear got to test one of the early Tesla Model S on their track. They also managed to overheat the batteries and got it into limp mode. The 1% use case is hard to plan for apparently, especially for your first real effort at building a production EV.
This isn't unique to EVs either. You will find no shortage of people telling you to never buy the first model year of any vehicle if you value high reliability.
While I agree that this is a serious error in the design or tuning of the vehicle, a modern car is an extremely complex piece of kit and it would be miraculous if any new design didn’t incorporate several similar flaws.
Engineering to factory is a very complex path fraught with noise from the process, and very subtle and seemingly insignificant tweaks often add up to significant problems in complex designs.
That there was a flaw in the process is not the least bit surprising or even disappointing, every single new vehicle design brought to market will have numerous tweaks and modifications or recalls over the first few years of fielding the design.
That the flaw was safety critical is unfortunate, but that a major automaker that typically handles things responsibly (with some notable historical exceptions) responded in an appropriate way is the system functioning nominally as it should.
That new companies with a more “tech” oriented approach would probably have silently pushed a performance degrading software update instead of fixing the problem is a harsh indictment of a deeply flawed engineering culture.
People who are into loud bikes and cars seem obnoxious to me. This comment especially doesn’t seem to care about performance or speed. Is the appeal really just to be loud and get attention?
As I understand it, the sound of certain car engines is carefully engineered and it shows, they certainly have some appeal. But loud cars disturb everyone around them, particularly people trying to exist in the surrounding homes. Hence some pushback against people who say they like it is to be expected.
It could also just be fun for the other commentor, the feeling of getting pushed into your seat, roar of the ICE, etc. They could do it on a track or some rural road where it wouldn't bother anybody, though of course it's unsafe to go ripping around on public roads.
I did not SEE a Mustang in person until I moved to the U.S. The sound of the powerful engine was like a rocket ship to me. I do not wish to disturb anyone with a loud engine.
Have you met these people? Bikes are often louder because they are harder to see and want to be noticed to stay alive. Assuming all noise is to draw attention for some ego reason just says a bit about you.
Not saying you're wrong but there should be an upper limit. I don't need to hear a motorcycle coming from a mile away while sitting in my living room. That seems less effective in a safety sense since by the time you get anywhere near another driver they're so overwhelmed with sound you could be coming from all directions at once.
FWIW, anecdotally and as a member of the motorcycling community, being loud does not seem to help much. People hear noise, but in traffic it doesn't help them locate the source of the noise. Things that do seem to help are primarily visual: bright solid colors, sitting high relative to traffic. Pretty much the opposite of the flat black low-rider with loud pipes.
you've never been or seen a child pushing toy cars around and making vroom vroom noises?
it's a multi-sensory experience, like "ohm", you feel it as much as you hear it, you're made one with the machine, its power an extension of yours. it's fun, try it sometime.
I'm not a car guy by any means. I'm seriously considering replacing my car with an electric bike just because I'm so cheap and cars are generally a pain in the ass to own.
I'm also sensitive to loud noises and I hate it when someone rev's their engine or blasts the full bass stereo in my neighborhood. So, I get what you're saying.
However, back in the day I had a Mercury Cougar and I loved the sound of that thing. The growl it made without even pressing the gas was oddly satisfying. I can understand the appeal of loud bikes and cars even though I don't appreciate when they overdo it.
I am still very confused as to why Ford decided to brand this very-much-not-a-Mustang as a Mustang. They should have resurrected an old model like the Torino or Elite before sullying the Mustang's good name like this.
I owned a V8 Mustang in my early 20s, and I test drove a Mach E recently and it's a very exciting drive. I haven't driven the Model Y yet, but I have driven the ID.4. Those 3 are really the sweet spot in terms of what I will most likely replace my ICE with when the time comes.
The Mach E is fast enough that I kind of get it now that I've driven one. Mustangs historically are straight line cars that didn't necessarily blow your mind when cornering. Essentially all electric cars fit that mold.
And anyway the Mach E is very heavy compared to most mustangs historically, but it's suspension design is better than what most Mustangs had historically so it might be more competitive down a curvy road than expected. Most Mustangs until fairly recently had a pretty hard time dealing with mid-corner bumps and road imperfections. And the Mach E accelerates harder than the vast majority of V8 Mustangs ever built.
My Mach-e has a switch to turn on engine noise through the B&O sound system relative to the pedal. I’m not polluting the local environment and people outside the car aren’t bothered by engine noise.
If you're buying an EV, it seems buying one from traditionally ICE manufacturers is a bad idea. With the exception of Hyundai. They all seem to be quite shit.
It's the same group, but they are separate companies. They do share a lot of parts and platforms, though. KIA EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5 are built on the same platform.
Hyundai Motor Company (the parent owner of Hyundai, Genesis) has a controlling stake in Kia, but my understanding is that they pretty much let the Kia designers do what they want.
Any data to back up your "routinely delivers" anecdote to try and slander Tesla?
All MachEs were just recalled for being unfit for use, even if some body panels were misaligned on Teslas (they aren't any different from every other brand, panels gaps issue is a myth), who in this story is delivering vehicles with worse quality?
I have noticed a terrible amount of "model churn". I was looking for a used EV and there's quite a few where the manufacturer only made that range for a couple of years and then stopped.
I don't know if "shit" or not, but I hadn't realized that many of the traditional ICE manufacturers are simply retrofitting ICE cars with EV parts. I test drove an audi q6 the other day and I was like "oh this feels and looks exactly like the ICE version". Turns out it doesn't even have a frunk. Why? because its the same exact model as the ICE, they just ripped out the ICE engine and put an EV one in. No wonder there expected range is awful...nothing about the car is engineered towards the advantages of using all electric (with the exception of no exhaust pipe).
300+ mile range seems pretty good. Most of my car use only ends up being maybe 10 miles a day, with only maybe once every three months going anywhere close to 300 miles. With three kids, I don't really want to travel longer than that.
Let's compare a Luxury SUV (Q8) vs Luxury Sedan (Tesla)
Range:
- Tesla Model S - 385mi (95 kWh battery) - 10hrs to fully charge
- Audi Q8 - 257mi (106kWh battery) - 11hrs to fully charge
Cargo volume:
- Q8 - 569 L
- Tesla Model S - 709 L
These ICE converted cars simply are not optimized for battery setups. How on earth does a luxury sedan have that much more space than an SUV and still performs better on battery efficiency? The Rivian R1S (built from the ground up), has an optional 140 kWh battery with 400mi range, and has 1,323 L cargo (or ~480 L with a 3rd row seat).
I thought about leaving Japan totally off because they just can't seem to build a decent EV to save themselves; I made a mistake leaving Honda as a Maybe; they kind of threw in the towel today.
All the Chinese EV makers are mostly making e-waste at the moment: mad rush to the bottom. Can't wait to see the photos of the fields with tens of thousands of these junked cars in a couple of years--
They uncancelled the Bolt and honestly they are bluffing with CarPlay as well; it will be back. They won't be able to sustain the blowback.
Their business strategy is braindead and they are going nowhere fast on their lame software: they seem to believe that the EV credit is money for them and not for their customers. They can build an ev <$30k but they only want to sell $45k EVs. I believe they will take a big hit over the next 2 years learning their lesson the hard way, but they still know how to build and integrate EVs with more economies of scale (more shared parts with economy ICE models, etc.) than their competitors.
I can't speak to the EV's coming from other ICE manufacturers but, my wife bought a Mach-E a couple of months ago it's an amazing vehicle. It's one of the smoothest rides of any car I've ever driven and doesn't blink on getting up steep hills. I drove a Prius once and I could swear I heard it breathing hard.
The self-driving works very well though in a purposely limited capacity.
After driving that car and researching the economics of owning an EV, I'm squarely convinced that I'll never buy another gas-powered car again.
Wow. 35,000 recalls. Each recall is estimated to take ~25 hours -- requires dropping battery and accessing the relay inside. Even if a service department can streamline this, this could be a very, very costly issue.
I wonder if the "fix" will be to sharply reduce maximum power draw and reduce charge rates, instead of replacing the under-spec'd part. That would make for a lot of unhappy customers, but they likely wouldn't have a lot of recourse.
> Another concern is just how swamped Ford's techs might be with replacing the HVBJBs in nearly 35,000 cars. The part itself is located inside of the sealed battery pack, meaning that in order to replace just the part, the 1,300-pound battery pack must be dropped from the car and opened on order to access the HVBJB. According to another user on Mach-E Forums, a high voltage battery swap takes approximately 25 hours on a warranty replacement.
Smart money will try to dump the cars on the used car market before the news catches up with vehicle values (if this materially nerfs vehicle performance). Considering the time required and labor shortages, the backlog for this work could be months if not over a year.
> I wonder if the "fix" will be to sharply reduce maximum power draw and reduce charge rates, instead of replacing the under-spec'd part. That would make for a lot of unhappy customers, but they likely wouldn't have a lot of recourse.
They already tried the software fix. The solution will almost certainly be just replacing it with the new part that has been going into Mach-Es for the last year.
A bit of a TLDR from some who had been through this and knows the saga:
The battery is fine. The issue is the part responsible for connecting/disconnecting the high voltage battery from the rest of the car when it’s off.
The relays can overheat from high current and weld open or closed. This is more prevalent in the higher performance models. Higher external temperatures, flooring it, and DC fast charging can all be part of the equation. Hit the wrong combo at the wrong time and… you lose the lottery.
This has been known for quite a while. Ford had a new part that fixes it which all the new vehicles had. But older cars weren’t given it until it failed (like mine). This has been a very sore spot with owners.
This recall fixes that. And it’s good they’re doing it, though way later than they should have.
There was a software update to “fix” the issue but it didn’t work. I think what it really did was try to help ensure the cars could limp to a dealer if it happened instead of just refusing to start. I’m not clear, but it’s well known in the community it didn’t fix it.
Looking at all this struggles, charging not working etc, why just not buy tesla :)
I was at charging station yesterday and Nissan at EvGo struggled to start charging for ~3 minutes. While he was trying to plug I was half way to charge to my desired level to continue the trip.
Tesla is selling massive amount of cars, they all work fine, it's a big support from customers. Yet, I see comments here and there how horrible tesla panel gaps because one blogger said so.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadIn the tech world we would have artificially limited the power throughput, providing no information or remedy to the customer. This seems like the right move.
While you can argue that Ford should have specced the bar correctly to start out with, I'm happy to see that this is the response. Get it back to a technician, and swap out the part, at no cost to the customer.
Just seems like shit design process to me, it sure, let’s pat them in the back for doing a mea culpa
It is possible that they did test it, but there were late software changes to reduce the power restrictions for marketing reasons. And maybe things weren't retested as much as they should be?
It could be as simple as them doing the engineering analysis, finding the potential problem, and then being overridden because someone thought it wouldn't happen in the real world.
We're talking about the relay that turns off high voltage in accidents and can weld itself in a permanent "on" state if people drive their sports car too sporty.
This isn't unique to EVs either. You will find no shortage of people telling you to never buy the first model year of any vehicle if you value high reliability.
Engineering to factory is a very complex path fraught with noise from the process, and very subtle and seemingly insignificant tweaks often add up to significant problems in complex designs.
That there was a flaw in the process is not the least bit surprising or even disappointing, every single new vehicle design brought to market will have numerous tweaks and modifications or recalls over the first few years of fielding the design.
That the flaw was safety critical is unfortunate, but that a major automaker that typically handles things responsibly (with some notable historical exceptions) responded in an appropriate way is the system functioning nominally as it should.
That new companies with a more “tech” oriented approach would probably have silently pushed a performance degrading software update instead of fixing the problem is a harsh indictment of a deeply flawed engineering culture.
It could be the roar, but EVs are much better at giving you the feeling of being pushed into your seat than ICE cars.
For cars it's part of the experience, not to mention that traditionally the roar level translated to performance.
it's a multi-sensory experience, like "ohm", you feel it as much as you hear it, you're made one with the machine, its power an extension of yours. it's fun, try it sometime.
I'm also sensitive to loud noises and I hate it when someone rev's their engine or blasts the full bass stereo in my neighborhood. So, I get what you're saying.
However, back in the day I had a Mercury Cougar and I loved the sound of that thing. The growl it made without even pressing the gas was oddly satisfying. I can understand the appeal of loud bikes and cars even though I don't appreciate when they overdo it.
For those on the other side, I agree that “all press is good press”.
The Mach E is fast enough that I kind of get it now that I've driven one. Mustangs historically are straight line cars that didn't necessarily blow your mind when cornering. Essentially all electric cars fit that mold.
And anyway the Mach E is very heavy compared to most mustangs historically, but it's suspension design is better than what most Mustangs had historically so it might be more competitive down a curvy road than expected. Most Mustangs until fairly recently had a pretty hard time dealing with mid-corner bumps and road imperfections. And the Mach E accelerates harder than the vast majority of V8 Mustangs ever built.
All MachEs were just recalled for being unfit for use, even if some body panels were misaligned on Teslas (they aren't any different from every other brand, panels gaps issue is a myth), who in this story is delivering vehicles with worse quality?
Companies like Nissan, GM, and BMW have very mature EV tech and EV experience.
I wouldn’t jump to generalizing. I’d rather stick with the tried and true “Ford makes shitty cars.”
I have noticed a terrible amount of "model churn". I was looking for a used EV and there's quite a few where the manufacturer only made that range for a couple of years and then stopped.
Range:
- Tesla Model S - 385mi (95 kWh battery) - 10hrs to fully charge
- Audi Q8 - 257mi (106kWh battery) - 11hrs to fully charge
Cargo volume:
- Q8 - 569 L
- Tesla Model S - 709 L
These ICE converted cars simply are not optimized for battery setups. How on earth does a luxury sedan have that much more space than an SUV and still performs better on battery efficiency? The Rivian R1S (built from the ground up), has an optional 140 kWh battery with 400mi range, and has 1,323 L cargo (or ~480 L with a 3rd row seat).
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x4Dyf_HkXDoXnuh6rJ5z...
BMW: No
BYD: No
Ford: No
GM: Yes
Honda: Maybe
Hyundai: Yes
Merc: Maybe
Rivian: Maybe
Tata: Maybe
Toyota: No
Tesla: Yes
VAG: Yes
All the Chinese EV makers are mostly making e-waste at the moment: mad rush to the bottom. Can't wait to see the photos of the fields with tens of thousands of these junked cars in a couple of years--
Their business strategy is braindead and they are going nowhere fast on their lame software: they seem to believe that the EV credit is money for them and not for their customers. They can build an ev <$30k but they only want to sell $45k EVs. I believe they will take a big hit over the next 2 years learning their lesson the hard way, but they still know how to build and integrate EVs with more economies of scale (more shared parts with economy ICE models, etc.) than their competitors.
The self-driving works very well though in a purposely limited capacity.
After driving that car and researching the economics of owning an EV, I'm squarely convinced that I'll never buy another gas-powered car again.
I wonder if the "fix" will be to sharply reduce maximum power draw and reduce charge rates, instead of replacing the under-spec'd part. That would make for a lot of unhappy customers, but they likely wouldn't have a lot of recourse.
> Another concern is just how swamped Ford's techs might be with replacing the HVBJBs in nearly 35,000 cars. The part itself is located inside of the sealed battery pack, meaning that in order to replace just the part, the 1,300-pound battery pack must be dropped from the car and opened on order to access the HVBJB. According to another user on Mach-E Forums, a high voltage battery swap takes approximately 25 hours on a warranty replacement.
They already tried the software fix. The solution will almost certainly be just replacing it with the new part that has been going into Mach-Es for the last year.
The battery is fine. The issue is the part responsible for connecting/disconnecting the high voltage battery from the rest of the car when it’s off.
The relays can overheat from high current and weld open or closed. This is more prevalent in the higher performance models. Higher external temperatures, flooring it, and DC fast charging can all be part of the equation. Hit the wrong combo at the wrong time and… you lose the lottery.
This has been known for quite a while. Ford had a new part that fixes it which all the new vehicles had. But older cars weren’t given it until it failed (like mine). This has been a very sore spot with owners.
This recall fixes that. And it’s good they’re doing it, though way later than they should have.
There was a software update to “fix” the issue but it didn’t work. I think what it really did was try to help ensure the cars could limp to a dealer if it happened instead of just refusing to start. I’m not clear, but it’s well known in the community it didn’t fix it.
And it's on them for having such a design that takes 25 hours to replace the actual connector.