I'm sure if I was looking at a 60 month loan I would probably feel the same way. I pay cash for my vehicles however & shelling out an EXTRA $2K for something just because it's cool(& I agree, the hybrid display is very cool)would not really work for me(especially when the Garmin NAV is SO MUCH better in every way)

~John

The only display I am missing is the battery SOC. I'm not sure if it really makes a whole lot of difference, but I like knowing as much about my vehicle as possible(I worked as an auto mechanic for 12 years in a previous life )

I managed to get 36 mpg on my last tank & that's without really babying it. I keep up with traffic & refuse to annoy the drivers behind me using some of the techniques described on this site that increase FE. My FEH is a 4WD & I can't really imagine getting a whole lot mpg more than that during normal around town & some 70 miles per hour highway driving regardless of what display's I have available.

~John

Makes sense to me. And Garmin's NAV units are definitely, no question, much better. (Garmin stockholder talking here!) We have something like 8 or 9 GPS units between my husband and myself: aviation, auto/vehicle, bicycling, hiking/geocaching, hiking w/kids (built-in unit-to-unit radio), etc.

- Shannon (Geeky, Wild Texan)

A load meter or "light" to let you know when you are at the max. battery output and are just about to trip the ICE on would be helpful.

The ICE starts way too easily in most people's opinion.

A quantitative ( numerical ) battery SOC would be better than just a crude low res bar graph.

I didn't realize that it was simply a bar graph... I guess it's like the instant mpg with the non-nav display. Very annoying.

Do you know what the value is for the max. battery output to trigger when it's going to turn the ICE on? If you don't know, it'll just require some testing I guess, to see what the threshold is.

Yes. You can pull 15,000 watts from the battery before the gas engine kicks in to assist. So all your EV driving is done with under 20 horsepower. Which in retrospect, is pretty amazing. But this number is not readily visible on a daily basis.
With over a year of driving, I know what 15,000 watts feels like.

Your electric motor never reaches that "94 HP" advertised. While I'm sure it's technically capable of that, it's never "allowed" to be wide open.

-John

I e-mailed SG regarding SoC and got this reply:

Q: Can the Scan Gauge be programmed to show the "state of charge" of the EV battery in a Ford Escape Hybrid? Thanks.

A: I don't know what the command would be to do this or even if there is a command.

Ron

Well, the information is there, at least according to this:
http://www.obd-2.com/
if you search for hybrid on that page, it shows they've added support for it, and when I run the app offline, I can see which module it is in, and what the id is, it's just a matter of which obd command is sent to retrieve it, and if there is any translating that needs to be done to get a percentage for SoC.

gpsman: I'm going to be looking for the information for the max load on the battery as well, to translate to an LED going off either blinking or solid (red) as an indicator to state that the ICE is close to starting.

Do you know how to display wattage input/output on the OBD?
Any car can do this under a "test" procedure.
You can see when you pull 15,000 watts ( 15.0 on the display I think ).
But it's not user friendly.
-John

I'm sure I can find the information...

And it's not a matter of being user friendly, as the microcontroller will be handling the 'friendliness' of the display