Already stung by a reduction in fuel economy ratings for both the Fusion Hybrid and C-Max Hybrid, Ford is yet again revising figures for various models, including the C-Max, Fiesta, Fusion and MKZ.
The breakdown of the changes is listed in the table below. Ford will also offer goodwill payments to lease and purchase customers, varying from $125-$1,050 depending on the model.
| U.S. EPA-Estimated Fuel Economy Label Ratings and Goodwill Payments* | ||||||
| Model Year | Vehicle | Powertrain | Revised
(City, Highway, Combined) |
Previous
(City, Highway, Combined) |
Lease Customers | Purchase Customers |
| 2014 | Fiesta | 1.0L GTDI M/T | 31 / 43 / 36 | 32 / 45 / 37 | $125 | $200 |
| 1.6L A/T | 27 / 37 / 31 | 29 / 39 / 32 | $150 | $250 | ||
| 1.6L SFE A/T | 28 / 38 / 32 | 30 / 41 / 34 | $275 | $450 | ||
| 1.6L M/T | 28 / 36 / 31 | 27 / 38 / 31 | Combined MPG not affected | Combined MPG not affected | ||
| 2013-14 | C-MAX | Hybrid | 42 / 37 / 40 | 45 / 40 / 43 | $300 | $475 |
| Fusion | Hybrid | 44 / 41 / 42 | 47 / 47 / 47 | $450 | $775 | |
| MKZ | Hybrid | 38 / 37 / 38 | 45 / 45 / 45 | $625 | $1,050 | |
| Model Year | Vehicle | Powertrain | Revised**
(Charge Sustaining, Charge Depleting, EV Range) |
Previous**
(Charge Sustaining, Charge Depleting, EV Range) |
Lease Customers | Purchase Customers |
| 2013-14 | C-MAX Energi | Plug-in Hybrid | 38 mpg / 88 MPGe+ /
19 mi EV range |
43 mpg / 100 MPGe+ /
21 mi EV range |
$475 | $775 |
| Fusion Energi | Plug-in Hybrid | 38 mpg / 88 MPGe+ /
19 mi EV range |
43 mpg / 100 MPGe+ /
21 mi EV range |
$525 | $850 | |
*Bolded figures in the above chart represent the values used to determine the customer goodwill payment.
** Combined numbers only. Revised EPA-estimated ratings: 40 city, 36 highway MPG; 95 city, 81 highway MPGe. Charge depleting range is 20 mi. Previous EPA-estimated ratings: 44 city, 41 highway MPG; 108 city, 92 hwy MPGe. Previous charge depleting range was 21.
+MPGe is the EPA equivalent measure of gasoline fuel efficiency for electric mode operation.
Had to see this coming, especially after the Hyundai debacle in years past and the CMax backtracking from 47/47/47 right after launch.
A big black eye for Ford.
Indeed since they have been carrying the mpg banner for domestics. However, IMO, at least the Focus’ mpg is right. I was impressed with its economy.
Now we wait and see if consumers punish them (I doubt it), or if this opens the floodgates wider.
It is a big black eye for Ford. To all appearances they did exactly what Hyundai did, with motives just as indefensible.
Can you imagine the reaction on this site if the same offense had been committed by General Motors? This thread would be stuffed with slurs against our current president (of whom I am not an enormous fan) and conspiracy theorists coming out of the woodwork.
And I’m still waiting for someone to try blaming this one on the United Auto Workers. Just to be sporting, I’ll give them a head start: “Unionized workers place Ford at such a cost disadvantage that management is under irresistible pressure to boost sales and per-car margins by any means necessary.”
“To all appearances they did exactly what Hyundai did, ”
Yes, Ford did! And for awhile Ford got away with it. Just like Hyundai.
But as most people already know, you can blow any factory mpg figures by just by stomping on the GO pedal like most drivers in the real world have to do.
YMMV!
Honda will be next, CR nailed hem on hybrid MPG not even being close.
GM and the Equinox/Terrain I4 should have been nailed years ago. Ditto the 1.8 base Cruze (I’ve read the 1.4 and Eco are better)
Accord Hybrid is next?
Yup, CR reported it wasn’t even close to the sticker – off 7 MPG.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-29/consumer-reports-finds-honda-accord-hybrid-misses-47-mpg-label.html
So margin was as wide as the Kia Soul a couple of years ago, the C-Max final numbers, and the MKZ.
It’s a big margin.
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/02/ford-fusion-and-c-max-review/index.htm
The C-Max only returned 37 mpg in Consumer Reports testing, so it is clear you’re cherry picking your numbers for your shilling purposes today. 37 v. 47 /= 40 v. 47. Also, owners are reporting a 42.4 mpg average for the Accord, 39.3 mpg for the C-Max hybrid on fueleconomy.gov. Oops.
I just quoted from Consumer Reports.
Lighten up Francis.
I drive a Fusion Energi, and I’m surprised. My (somewhat limited) experience with running the car on gasoline has been 45 mpg city, and 42 highway, with the highway travel at 70 to 75 mph. I don’t think the Fusion Hybrid will do 47 mpg on the highway, but considering I’m getting 45 mpg city and my car is carrying an additional 300 lbs of batteries that the Hybrid model is not, I have to think 47 mpg is not out of reach for that car. On Fuelly, the most common MPG figure is 41, so maybe I drive differently.
I routinely get a battery only range of 22 miles, and recently did a 24.9 mile round trip on battery only.
Oh, who cares?
Like anybody takes manufacturer’s claims about anything at face value?
God bless CR.
Stupid hurts, sh1t stinks and companies lie. I think I got it now.
My dad likes to troll salesmen by asking “how close will he fuel economy come to the sticker”. Remember, Canadian EnerGuide ratings are usually way more optimistic than the EPA. Pretty much every time they say “well, those numbers are pretty good, they have to be by law…” and we just laugh.
I predict more of this as MPG numbers climb. Small percentage variations make for big MPG changes.
As has been discussed ad naseum, the MPG measure is not a good way to compare fuel economy. It is not a linear measure, so the difference between 40 and 47MPG is not the same as the difference between 10 and 17 MPG.
As such, reasonable variability will appear greater as the benchmark number goes up. If you have a vehicle that gets 100 MPG, and normal drivers see a range of 90-110, I think that’s reasonable. However, if my truck is “suppossed” to get 18MPG, 8 would be completely unacceptable while 28 would be beyond outstanding.
Assuming I didn’t pooch my math, here is an example:
Accord should get 47MPG, which is 2.1 gallons/100 miles. It misses by 7(!), so actually uses 2.5 gallons/100 miles. A difference of about $1.50 per 100 miles.
Truck should get 18MPG, which is 5.5 gallons/100 miles. It misses by a mere 2, and so actually uses 6.3 gallons/100 miles. Now the difference of only 2 MPG is costing more (roughly $2.75) per 100 miles than the Accord.
If we someday see 70 MPG cars, watch as all the math-illiterate try to wrap their heads around the fact that the 60MPG they are actually getting isn’t really a significant departure from the advertised number.
Yes, this, but only somewhat.
The difference between 20 and 21 MPG is .05 gallons/mile and .0476 gallons/mile, or 5%. The difference between 40 and 41 MPG is .025 and .0243 gallons/mile, or 2.5%.
However, going from 47 to 42 is huge, that says they were off by 10%, which is pretty darn big of an overestimate.
The other problem is driver style does make such a difference, my dad is easily 10% better than my mom on their Prius, while the GF gets better than EPA on her Crosstrek (EPA is 23/30/26 but she gets 31) and I get better than EPA on my S2000 (EPA is 18/25/21 but I get 27-28), but for both of us we are really good at being steady on highway speeds and not using the brakes much.
The buyers of the C-Max and Fusion Hybrids are the kind who are already driving well, and its probably the same thing with the Accord Hybrid, which is probably why there hasn’t been nearly the rash of driver’s complaints you would expect with such a difference.
My wife and I purchased (lease actually) a Ford C-MAX Hybrid last summer. We’ve driven approx. 14,000 miles. Our lifetime fuel MPG is 36.7.
Now I admit my driving style can be best described as”wannabe Stig” but I did expect better than 37MPG! My wife is the primary driver of the vehicle, and I’d say she is pretty normal driving style.
Its not the stig-type acceleration that kills your mileage (it doesn’t help, but it hurts less), its actually engaging the hydraulics on the brakes that really kills your mileage on a hybrid.
Thus you really need to learn to feather the brakes and slow early and gently. Its also why 1-pedal settings like Tesla and i3 are so important: by separating out the energy regeneration from the “oh F@#)(8 stop now”, you can much more easily ensure you’re harvesting the energy when stopping in normal traffic.
Regeneration can improve fuel economy by as much as 20 percent. Since most hybrids have more regenerative braking available at higher speed, do more of your stopping at the beginning of the brake application. If you have to increase pedal pressure as you approach your stopping point, you’re using the friction brakes more than is optimal.
Nicholas Weaver,
I tend to agree… Acceleration doesn’t waste gas, braking wastes gas. Acceleration *uses* gas.
Still, I can’t persuade my wife to look for red lights ahead and lift her foot as soon as she sees one.
I get perhaps 10mpg better fuel economy than she does. In addition, we’ve always had a car for each of us. Brakes last half as long on her car as they do on mine.
My sister’s new Mazda CX-5 hasn’t even come close to it’s EPA ratings for fuel economy. She still loves it though.
Most Mazda cars are a blast to drive. This can often leads to a Mazda driver accelerating harder than they should, thus blowing EPA ratings out the tail pipe.
We had a couple of USED Mazdas when my kids still lived at home and their mpgs were just as bad as our other cars when driven by the lead-foot members of my family.
I’m betting that the difference we see in EPA vs real work MPG numbers is the OEM’s designing and tuning vehicles to the EPA test to help with CAFE and marketing. They know that in the real world the MPG will be less to some extent, but all the EPA test is does is create a benchmark, not guarantee real world MPG.
I’ve always assumed that manufacturers tuned their car’s fuel efficiency to the EPA cycle and not “real world” conditions. They’d be fools not to. Everybody looks at the MPG listed on the window sticker. Only a tiny percentage of car shoppers are going to cross check actual MPGs reported by sources like Consumer Reports, fueleconomy.gov or owners forums. And most car reviewers are laughably vague when reporting on observed MPG. “We averaged 24 mpg driving over a couple of days” (city? highway? traffic? style?).
When my wife first drove her Grand Cherokee home, we left Phoenix
with a full tank of gas and 3 miles on the odo, and got home to New Mexico almost 9 hours later, because it was a new car and we wanted to break the engine in gently. We took it easy!
Even taking it easy, and varying our driving speed while on I-10, the overall mpgs we got, full tank to full tank, was no better than 17.5 mpg. I know this because the VIC told me so!
Now, with well over 45K on the odo, the mpgs haven’t gotten any better. Again, I know this because yesterday I serviced the GC and reset the VIC to all zeros.
Do I dare say anything nice about VW? My 2012 Golf TDI handily exceeds VW’s mileage claims for both city and highway, and I don’t make any effort in that regard. Actually, quite the contrary. My impression is that VW diesels consistently exceed their predicted MPG. Also, there’s the never-ending criticism of VW vehicles in general, yet the litany of recalls reported here on a daily basis seem to include everyone but VW/Audi. Is that not true?
Nothing wrong with saying something nice about VW.
I’ve noticed some excellent TDI fuel economy reports. Still, it’s diesel, which is a different ball game.
I don’t know about recalls but we were burned by the VW experience and the few people we know with late-ish VWs have abandoned them in favor of something else. Maybe they’ve now turned the corner and the lack of recall news is a good sign but it will be a while before I’m willing to give them another shot. Probably a long while.
The car did drive nice, though. Very connected feel. But that’s not a critical factor for me in a daily driver.
I’m the first one to bash VW, but their TDI mileage is superior. I had a Golf wagon TDI as rental car in Germany a few weeks ago and had 5l/100 km (~47 mpg) while having the car loaded up with 3 people, stroller and cargo for 3 week vacation. Even on shorter trips it had similar mileage. Autobahn driving at ~85 mph.
“Do I dare say anything nice about VW? My 2012 Golf TDI…”
Yes, please feel free to speak glowingly about my car (mine’s a 4dr DSG btw)
As to the article,
excuse me while I gloat…
Jimmyy,
Here’s the story you’ve been crying for – highjacking threads and whatnot while impugning Indian engineers the world over. Where you at? The table has been set; we’re all here waiting on you.
Yea! Another check from Ford. And now I get better than EPA estimates.
Obviously, someone at Ford really messed up. My question is, did no one at Ford drive the C-Max? I knew I wasn’t going to get 47 MPG when I test drove it. Mark Fields, next time just call me. I will save you millions of dollars.
That is the mind boggling part to me. They come out with a huge advertising campaign how it destroys the Prius v in fuel economy but when you start looking at the numbers that really impact fuel economy, it didn’t add up. The C-max was heavier by 400+lbs, larger frontal area, worse drag coefficient, bigger engine (with more system power), wider tires. Both vehicles use very similar engine and driveline tech (atkinson cycle, eCVT that utilizes electric motors). The only things really in Ford’s favor, on paper, was the fact that it had the ability to run on higher speeds all electric and LiIon batteries. But still, all that energy getting to the battery comes from regen or engine generation, so the efficiencies are still on a similar scale. Someone should have been raising their hand and saying, “we should double check these numbers… they look a little too good to be true.” In all reality, the cost to fuel the cars is practically the same between 40mpg and 47mpg. Someone had to know that people would see missing the mark by 7mpg and freak out despite it not really amounting to much money. One of those perception is more important than reality things.
“In all reality, the cost to fuel the cars is practically the same between 40mpg and 47mpg. Someone had to know that people would see missing the mark by 7mpg and freak out despite it not really amounting to much money. One of those perception is more important than reality things.”
Yes. For reference, lets say 15000 miles/year, 40 vs 43 vs 47 MPG, $4/gallon gas:
40 MPG: $1500/yr
43 MGP: $1395/yr
47 MGP: $1275/yr
So Ford, by giving back $475 for the difference between 40 and 43 is covering nearly 5 years of the gas savings difference.
My C-Max was one of the first few hundred delivered and I could have told Ford is was never going to get 47 MPG. I personally don’t care because I expected 38-42 MPG combined before I bought my car. I drove a pre-production model and a dealer demo before the C-Max was on sale. I actually would like to go back to the old programming.
Someone higher up had to know. I cannot comprehend the idea that the person in charge of the project was simply unaware of the fact that the real world MPG was so far off. The people I know at Ford mostly work on trucks. The amount of minutia they know about the F150 and SuperDuty is mindboggling. It doesn’t make sense that a big detail like this slips by.
“Someone should have been raising their hand and saying, ‘we should double check these numbers… they look a little too good to be true.\'”
Wasn’t possible. Why? At the time, all hands at Ford were so busy bitching and moaning about Hyundai’s optimistic numbers that there was no time to look at Ford’s own questionable numbers.
It’s a great day when Ford is forced to tell the truth.
Isn’t the truth a a wonderful thing?
It’s allows the public to see, yet again how Big Al encouraged dishonesty in all aspects of Ford motor and put results ahead of everything.
The best part is Ford knew about this when they “reprogrammed” these models. They were hoping that was enough to fool customers and this whole situation would go away. But, they miscalculated that too.
Again this is a disgusting company. Flat out lying to customers to sell your underperforming products is not a good business plan.
it truly is a case of your mileage may vary. I had a cmax as a rental once and I average 51 mpg around town without much hyper miling. On the highway, I was seeing about 40. I actually enjoyed it better than a lot of cars because I could actually drive it a bit more enthusiastically and brake a little more (instead of coasting all the way to a stop) without killing the mileage. I was really impressed. It’s not a truly a Prius competitor, but an option to get better than almost any gasoline car sorts of mileage in a practical shape that can rival a focus for fun to drive.
“it truly is a case of your mileage may vary.”
No, not even close. This is simply a case of Ford lying to gain sales.
I’m going from my own experience. I’ve had a Fusion 1.6t as a rental and those didn’t meet their mileage marks. I can’t say that about the Cmax though. I put around 350-400 miles on it with the overwhelming majority being 75 mph highway cruising and the average for the trip was 40 mpg. At lower highway speeds (more in line with the EPA), I was averaging over 40, and as I said, I did a stint of around town driving where the mileage for that period was 51 mpg.
Z71_Silvy, all automakers do it. And YMMV based on how and where the vehicle is driven.
Contractors I know who drive Silverado don’t get anywhere near the mpgs listed on the window sticker. What they get is no better than what I get in my thirsty Tundra 5.7 (without cylinder deactivation).
Ford has revised the MPG numbers TWICE.
Who else in the history of automobiles has had to do this? NOBODY!
Ford lied flat out. And no, everybody does not do this.
“Ford lied flat out”
So did Hyundai, and KIA, and Toyota, and even, (gulp) Honda!
Anyone who can publicly state for the record and with a straight face that they achieve EPA mpg numbers, has to be doing so going downhill with the wind at their backs.
Too many variables in the real world that are not factored in during factory testing.
Except for the Civic hybrid, Honda actually tends to be the manufacturer who guesses their real world fuel consumption most accurately. It could be because their cars are set up more for actual driving than to do good at EPA testing, not only because they’re a lot more honest than everyone else. (Yeah, I know they s**k at admitting mistakes, but it’s because they don’t have much experience at making mistakes)
IIRC, Ford didn’t actually ‘lie flat out’ but simply exploited a loophole in the way EPA mpg ratings are assessed. I believe it was a matter of using Fusion Hybrid EPA ratings to calculate those for the C-Max since both use the same, identical hybrid drivetrain.
Deceitful? Yes, because the two vehicles have vastly different body styles that would obviously impact real world numbers. Nevertheless, what Ford did was allowed under the EPA rules at the time.
“Your mileage may vary”
One of the two most famous disclaimers in advertising.
The other? Something about “four hours”.
Freddie, the four hours referred to “seek immediate medical attention.”
I think the first revised versions of CMAX MPG were spot on. The new ones are being tougher on the CMAX than the EPA is on other cars. (I’m looking at you Equinox.) The lifetime MPG in my CMAX, rising after a long winter, is 43.9. Last week I made a 400 mile trip to Chicago with 4 adults and a hatch full of luggage and averaged 46.9, the best highway MPG I have ever recorded for that car. What I initially said about the CMAX still holds. It’s won’t give you Prius-level mpg, but it is the cheapest full hybrid that you can buy that is at least as quick as the average car.
We bought a 2014 Escape with a gas mileage sticker that said 46 mpg. Well that sure isn’t happening. We get about 34 mpg. I have never owned a car that I couldn’t match the sticker within 2 mpg. I drive for a Ford dealer and Escape seems to be the worse. I delivered a F150 4 wheel drive and averaged 10/100km. The Escape following me averaged 10.8L/100km. There no way that truck should be showing better mileage. That being said it’s not even on the rebate list.