Or just my imagination???

I know in the manual it states that there is a 1,000 mile break in period and not to even measure your mileage before then. I did anyway....but I digress.

So I noticed today that I am able to accelerate past 30mph in EV mode up to almost 35mph. Before today I was never able to come close. The best I could do was 25mph.....maybe a hair over 30mph on a downgrade. Today I can do it almost any time. This is not a matter of me "learning" how to accelerate as no mater how gently I let the vehicle accelerate before, I could never get it past 25mph without the ICE coming on. Today I was hitting 30mph without even trying.

Strange.

So I tapped the Odometer switch to check my total mileage (I usually keep it in trip mode) and low and behold I had just crossed the 1,000 mile mark today. So that has me wondering whether or not Ford has the Hybrid drive system limited in the software/firmware until the vehicle reaches 1,000 miles.

Am I just paranoid?

 

I don't think so. The first thousand miles is for the vehicle to learn the driving pattern and store them in the computer. There is a way to let the car "relearn" everything, not sure reset the battery will work or not, probably not on this model.

 

I don't know what it relearns when the battery (normal car battery) is disconnected and reconnected, beyond certain things -- when I disconnected my low voltage battery to do a P.I.E. radio plug install, I had to press my brake pedal to full travel after plugging the battery back in -- standard behavior documented in the manual for when the battery's been disconnected (teaches the vehicle the full travel of the brake pedal, again, and clears a standard "Check Brake System" or similar message from the message center.) The sunroof has to be retrained similarly, at least per the manual (I didn't have to on mine) so it opens the correct amount.

I didn't notice any changes in the vehicle's FE or driving characteristics but the manual did say to drive it a bit after reconnecting so it could "relearn" various things.

The Ford Mustang forums which I occasionally follow since my brother and father have new Mustangs also refer to this 1k to 3k learning and improved fuel economy behavior in their vehicles. I'm no mechanic but it was something about the vehicles running "rich" for the first 1k-3k miles, and after that break-in running less so resulting in some MPG gains.

 

Well, when I reconnect the battery on my Mazda 6, it resets the PCM and the engine management will relearn everything. MAYBE the PCM and TCM in our Escape will do the same, I'm not very sure, probably not.

 

Is it limited to 1k miles or more like 3k miles? I bought an 06 FEH that was a demo and it had 1200 miles on it. I'd hate to be driving a car that learned on test drives.

 

Based on the fact that the FEH manual says one shouldn't compute ones MPG until 1000 miles, and really ought to delay that until 3000 miles has been achieved on the odometer, I'd say 3k miles is more the gauge.

I don't think that means one has to drive 3000 miles after disconnecting & reconnecting the low voltage battery to retrain the vehicle sufficiently, but I'm not a mechanic and I don't play one on TV or the Internet.

 

I kinda thought they continually learned and basically adjusted the engine based on its performace during the last time period. Killing the battery would erase that "buffer" and therefore the engine would have nothing to work with. Not that they learned once at 3,000 and never changed.

Learning once would seem a bad idea because who believes an engine at 90,000 miles peforms the same as it did with 3,000.

So driving on one that learned on test drives would be okay... after you drove it long enough to push that out of the "buffer".

Of course I'm not a mechanic either.

 

Your take makes more sense and is probably a lot closer than my "set it and forget it" description of how the vehicle adapts.

 

I don't know....it just seemed to me that it was too creepy of a coincidence for my performance to change like that in one day. I've been driving it every day and watching my performance very closely and this was a sudden change. For it to happen almost exactly at 1000 miles seems really odd. Almost like they limited the system's usage until it had a chance to "break in" the motors, generators, etc. I'd like to hear from the engineers on this one...

 

If you go back to some of the discussions on the "Dearborn Experience...", the Ford engineers claim the FEH does not learn a particular driver's style, but it does learn how to optimize that particular vehicle. When you "unplug the power" it will therefore need to go through that vehicle's optimization again.