Okay by me. Maybe a mod can add an s to the thread title.
Damn sorry to hear about the AC. But great data re MPG! Idling i find is where the car burns the most fuel. Mine bounces around 13.8 -14.1 at idle AFR which should be best I dont know if running a little leaner would help but i trust Ford knows how to tune an engine better than me lolI took a 9.5 day road trip from Scottsdale to Dearborn to visit my son and his family. He's an engineer at Ford. So 2.5 days each way (with the side trips) and 4.5 days while there.
Visited the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum on the way and Mt. Rushmore on the way back. Pictures to follow but not as many scenery pictures as the Weekend trip to Wyoming.
Spent 4.5 days around Dearborn. I planned to do the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise but put it off until the final afternoon and then it was pouring rain, so skipped it. But the Henry Ford Museum was interesting.
Below is the trip data from the car. Missed 5K miles by a few trips around the block and 78 hours of driving by 35 seconds.
I averaged 23.9 MPG but it was high 24s until the return leg from Northernmost Michigan. Lots of 2 lane blacktop with 25 MPH small towns plus lots of hills in the Dakotas, Wyoming and Colorado. I switched to the instantaneous display (which also shows the average since car start or reset) between fill ups and the hills destroyed MPG.
The trip data calculates out to 64 MPH average over the 78 hours the ignition was on for the trip (4991.5 miles divided by the 78 hours of ignition on time). That was higher than I expected with the days of stop and go around Dearborn and all the small towns along the way, not to mention idling in fast food drive-thrus. LoL I guess the 150+ MPH stretches helped the average a lot. I didn't really want to go that fast but when I slowed down to a hundred, the cops would start gaining on me. ;)
Only significant problem with the car was the AC crapped out on the last day (which was a half day). I can't imagine a single cause for the problem. The fan would barely blow and the air was obviously cooled but not even close to as much as normal.
As I said, I can't think of a single point of failure that would effect both the fan speed AND the air temps. And the fans still had 7 speeds but the highest was about what 3 of 7 is normally. Also, if I turned AC off, the air temps stayed the same as when on as if it didn't register when I turned the A/C off despite the light on the button turning off.
Anyway since it has earmarks of a software glitch, I'm going to track down the Sync reset procedure before taking it to the dealer.
The minor problems were NAV stuff, like selecting a gas station way-point along the route NAV said was 20 miles away and then NAV saying it was 60 miles away after you select it and have 50 miles of gas left. The 20 miles was right, BTW. Also, the NAV database didn't include Mt. Rushmore despite the fact that I'm pretty sure it was finished more than a few months ago.
I did find a problem that wasn't Ford's fault. When finding a hotel, NAV gives you a list of hotels on your route with an option of adding it as a way-point or calling the hotel. Great idea when the phone numbers are actually to the hotel and not some holding company centralized booking.
You really need to call because several nights I had to go thru 5 or 6 hotels to find one that was still in business! For example, apparently every hotel in the city limits of the small town of Speedway Indiana went out of business since the NAV database was made.
Anyway, when you select the call option, you get a custom screen showing the call and not much more and no location information. So when you ask if they have a vacancy and ask the rate, the centralized call center immediately asks what hotel chain and town etc you are asking about because they are taking the calls for multiple chains and thousands of hotels! Its fairly comical when you can't tell them the name of the hotel or the city its in or even where you are because it is changing as you talk and you aren't bothering to read the "now entering" signs.
Personally I think the hotel chains should maintain a phone number for each hotel even if it just routes to a central call center. That way, the agent can see that number and know what hotel you are calling about. But Ford could HELP by adding the hotel name/location to the call screen. Travelers shouldn't have to memorize that from the previous screen before calling the hotel. Maybe Ford doesn't add the name and location to that screen to keep from being sued when someone drives into a bridge abutment while reading it to the agent. I dunno.
Either way, Ford should add an option to add the hotel as a way-point from the custom call screen. Because even after you confirm a vacancy and price after a hundred questions for them to figure out what hotel you want, you have to go back to the search screen and try to remember/figure out which one you had just talked to so you can get to an option to add it as a way-point. Not so simple when you were talking to a hotel on the 3rd screen of a list that also contained other hotels in the same chain.
I probably didn't post it in that thread but I was right about it being some software glitch. I disconnected the battery for a few minutes and everything was fine after that and for the many years thru now. Considering all the hardware problems with S550 AC, I dodged a bullet there.
Thats a Ford thing. Mine has been going strong at 60k miles. My friends s197 died at 40k right as the warranty ended
