So we had some interesting things happen last Friday which turned into some immediate service before a trip we were leaving for that day.

About a month ago when the temperatures started to heat up a bit, we decided to finally test the A/C (we bought our FEH in November and hadn't been in any warm weather conditions until recently). At first, it seemed like things just weren't getting cold, and we soon realized that the A/C wasn't working at all. Fine, a little annoying as it's getting hotter out, we were going to take it in and have it looked at. We took it in, and the tech said we'd have to schedule an appointment for them to look at it and see why it wasn't working, but that it was just a comfort thing.

About a week later, we noticed that in the afternoons, we could no longer go into EV mode at all... We'd let it sit overnight, and it'd work properly again in the morning.

Now on Thursday things heated up outside quite a bit more, we'd gotten our oil changed and not too long afterwards we noticed some very disturbing behaviour. We'd put our foot on the gas, the car would jerk a bit and slowly putter up to speed. We were not getting any assist at all, and taking our foot off the gas did not send the usual charge into the battery... So just to test, I put it in L, and did a fake-shift once I actually got up to speed a bit, and absolutely nothing happened. It was as if I wasn't in L, the transmission behaved no differently than it would have in D, the car just coasted, not charging and not slowing me down at all.

So we went in to a dealer first thing in the morning, explained the problem, and also explained that my theory was that everything but the transmission problem was related to the A/C being broken (even though a tech had previously INSISTED to my wife that the A/C does NOTHING with the hybrid portion of the vehicle and is PURELY for comfort).

A couple hours later, I called to see how it was doing, and they informed me that the A/C was EMPTY! How does that happen? I would assume a leak of course... they'd 'recharged' it as they said, and injected a dye to find a leak... another hour later and they could NOT find any sign of a leak... and their call into Ford had confirmed my theory.

Now everything is working as it should, we have working A/C, and we've found a dealer that we can go to on a regular basis (we've had some issues with our previous dealer and the people where we had it fixed were really nice and were actually helpful).

I'm still interested to find out why the A/C was empty... we went around 1400km on the highway with the A/C running on and off with no issues. I guess I'll see in time if there's a slow leak of some sort that they weren't able to find.

So I guess the moral of the story is that if you notice that your A/C is not working and someone tells you that it can wait, insist that it can't wait as your FEH will no longer accelerate as expected (which is a little dangerous crossing traffic). I really wish that people were trained properly on how the vehicle works so that they can prevent issues like this in the future.

The only thing I don't understand is why the transmission was behaving the way it was. I mean I understand why I couldn't go into EV with things not being able to get cooled in the back, but I would have still expected driving in L with my foot off of the gas to slow the vehicle down. Any theories on this one?

At least everything is working as expected again...