Power My Trip / GOM Fail

[luebri]

Summary (TLDR)
Ford Nav / Power my trip test. 2nd leg of out and back day trip…. For the return trip I gave Ford Nav (Which I dont normally use) a chance to make the right decision on whether I would need a charge or not. It made the wrong conclusion. It thought I should stop at a charger. I ignored it and arrived in my garage at 11% SOC and 45 minutes sooner than I would have if stopping for their recommended charge.

Ford NAV / Power my trip is not very smart.

My initial guess was the logic is using some sort of acceptable minimum arrive at home SOC, but I could not find that setting if it is a user input option. Upon researching after the fact it appears arrival SOC < 10% will cause Ford NAV to add charging stops.

My recommendations as a user to @Ford Motor Company .

1) Ford should consider home as a destination differently than another day to day random destination.
2) Minimum Arrival SOC should be settable for both.
3) Ford should consider the "Home" charging situation of the vehicle.



Details Below
To preface, since before I took delivery (last November) I knew not to trust the GOM. That said, over the 15 months I have been on this forum, and Ford’s communication, its beens stated that the GOM is much better if using Ford NAV so the GOM can factor in the variables of your planned trip (elevation, temp, speed, etc.). I never, ever use Ford NAV. I’m a Waze guy… police detection is invaluable to me. For range estimation, I watch the MPK and use my brain regarding anticipated speed etc. To date, my brain has been reliable for my 13k miles of driving.

I have also had only 1 scenario in which I attempted a Battery Precondition to DCFC using Ford NAV. Again, this was probably more out of curiosity than necessity as it wasn’t that cold. Side Note: Not being able to use my preferred NAV to be able to DCFC precondition is a poor user experience to say the least.

That said for curiosity case I gave Power my trip a “stress test” to see how it would do.

The trip: Quick trip to the Northwoods to help my folks with some quick tasks at their Lake Cottage and then right back home. I’ve made this trip several times this summer, just not in the same day before. So I knew what to expect.


Outbound trip:

• 116 miles trip (one way)
• Left at 7am. Arrived at 9 AM. So almost exactly avg speed of 60 mph. Very typical for this trip.
• Avg Temp 50f
• Preconditioned Battery
• 94% SOC. (Extended Range model)
• Uphill. Elevation 810 to 1590
• Arrived with 47% SOC. (61.57 kwh used / 1.88 MPK)

So used exactly half my available SOC on the outbound trip. With the warmer weather, and elevation being my friend for the return trip, I had no worries. That said, I was also well aware of all my charging options which are not great (pretty much all slow Level 2), but there are a few options if need be.


Return Trip / STRESS Test:

• 116 miles return trip.
• Downhill. Elevation 1590 to 810.
• Avg Temp 65f.
• Standard GOM had me at 103 miles (47% SOC) of range prior to entering my destination. Interestingly more pessimistic than my recent drive of 2 hours, but pretty much in alignment with my lifetime MPK.

I Entered my home address in Ford NAV. (which was a pain in the ass, Ford’s address detection sucks, admittedly it is a newer street.)
After finally entering my home as destination…

• GOM reduced by 2 miles to 101. So even with elevation drop, it did not add anticipated range. It must have reduced due to mostly 55 MPH roads?
• As I suspected it routed me out of the way to have to get a quick charge in the middle of my trip.
• I ignored the NAV and went on my normal route as I was curious when it would “figure it out”
• It switched between chargers throughout the drive, none of them being the one I would have used if I truly needed to get a brief charge to get home. Ironically about half way thru the trip with charger it wanted to use was further than my actual house! Brilliant!
• Ford NAV figured it out correctly only when I made my 2nd to last turn. 0.9 miles from home!!!
• Arrived with 11% SOC. (47.16 kwh used / 2.45 MPK)
• I was oscillating between 2.5 and 2.7 mpk the whole trip at ~62 mph on 55 speed county highways.

Based on this stress test, I was dissapointed in pretty much all of the "intelligent" aspects of Ford NAV.

Sponsored

 

[MRButtler]

All I got to say is the one time I tried Waze, it took me off a main thoroughfare, directly to police.

 

[Revenge]

Agreed they need to add the option to set minimum SOC. I planned a trip using Ford and the stops it planned were always when I would hit 10% SOC and then have me charge up to say 67% to reach the next charger at 10%. I would rather spend a few more minutes and get more charge and arrive with a bigger cushion than 10% but I could not find anywhere to change that setting.

 

[RickLightning]

I believe arriving with 20% is the Ford default. And it has no way to be told you have a charger at home.

 

[luebri]

And it has no way to be told you have a charger at home.

If you have Ford Charger setup with your account it does, or at least it should.

Regarding 3rd party chargers. Simply allowing a user to enter in the Ford Pass app some basic specifications of there at home charging situation would not be elite level Software engineering.

This is basic user experience stuff. We are the "pioneers" of this space for Ford. They have acknowledged they have team members reading online forums. As a user that thinks the intelligent NAV part of the User Experience is lacking, I am providing insight as to why, and ideas to improve..

 

[TaxmanHog]

Two features I would like to see:

• Manual Precondition soft button on the charging menu
• Destination details setting that allows a target arrival SOC, as ABRP has in their route planning tool.

 

[RickLightning]

If you have Ford Charger setup with your account it does, or at least it should.

Regarding 3rd party chargers. Simply allowing a user to enter in the Ford Pass app some basic specifications of there at home charging situation would not be elite level Software engineering.

This is basic user experience stuff. We are the "pioneers" of this space for Ford. They have acknowledged they have team members reading online forums. As a user that thinks the intelligent NAV part of the User Experience is lacking, I am providing insight as to why, and ideas to improve..

Ford Navigation has no knowledge of a home charger, regardless of brand.

If you added your charger to PlugShare, and indicated it was public, and then told Ford Nav to include chargers outside the network, wonder if it would show up eventually if you included level 2 chargers.

 

[Zprime29]

If you have Ford Charger setup with your account it does, or at least it should.

Regarding 3rd party chargers. Simply allowing a user to enter in the Ford Pass app some basic specifications of there at home charging situation would not be elite level Software engineering.

As simple as a check box that says "I have a home charger". And thinking about it, the truck knows where we have chargers if we saved the location for setting the charge limit. It shouldn't be that hard to load those locations into the map, it know where they are and if they are AC or DC based on charge history. The information is there.

 

[luebri]

Ford Navigation has no knowledge of a home charger, regardless of brand.

If you added your charger to PlugShare, and indicated it was public, and then told Ford Nav to include chargers outside the network, wonder if it would show up eventually if you included level 2 chargers.

My points regarding the home charger and my other points are less a matter what it currently does do, more what it should do, or better put a matter of what a good user experience would be.

As myself and @Zprime29 stated, there are ways to do it regarding the home charger. The info is there and/or could be easily obtained.

On 5/19/21 CEO Farley specifically mentioned the improvements via OTA software and the "intelligent route planning" as major bullet points of his presentation. He set the expectations at that point.

My post is stating an example of multiple parts of the intelligent route planning that fell short and furthermore how software could be improved to improve that experience.

 

[FirstF150InCasco]

All I got to say is the one time I tried Waze, it took me off a main thoroughfare, directly to police.

Waze is great, I find. It has the best data for where the cops are.

 

[Maquis]

There would be no need for the Nav to even know if you can charge at home if you could simply specify the minimum arrival SoC.

 

[MRButtler]

Waze is great, I find. It has the best data for where the cops are.

It would seem the cops are aware too.

In my case, it routed me towards the PD and saved me no time.

 

[hturnerfamily]

I agree that the Ford Nav trip planner does NOT take into consideration your arrival 'plans'... meaning that it may always assume that you need to arrive ANYWHERE with a minimum of 20%.

And yet, if you are arriving at home, where you have charging, or arriving at a hotel which has overnight Level 2 charging, or even like me this week, arriving at a campground with my camper where I will have 240v 50amp service to charge with my FordMobileCharger, you have no way to 'tell' it that fact.

Like others, I've realized that my own calculations make more sense than Ford's does, and google maps 'miles to destination' in combination with the 'guessometer' and the 'm/kwh' average gives me all I need... but, it IS an exercise in trigonometry, sometimes, while you are driving, though (!)

: )

 

[TaxmanHog]

Like others, I've realized that my own calculations make more sense than Ford's does, and google maps 'miles to destination' in combination with the 'guessometer' and the 'm/kwh' average gives me all I need... but, it IS an exercise in trigonometry, sometimes, while you are driving, though (!)

: )

Mental gymnastics keeps us old farts young.....

 

[luebri]

Now that I have Power-up 6.3, I did some more testing.... A few notes from a recent ~260 mile trip (520 round trip) (Extended Range model) from Neenah, WI to St Paul, MN and Back the next day. This time testing / comparing Apple Maps EV trip planning to Ford's.

- Summary, I like Apple's more than Ford nav but it is still near worthless compared to planning charge stops ahead via Plugshare and monitoring MPK and calulating on my own.

Side tangent: if this route planning is the best AI we got, we dont have to worry about the singularity for a long time!!!

- Both Nav system wanted me to stop at 2 chargers (I was around 85% SOC for each initial departure) to make the trip (30 to 40F). I was able to achieve both trips with one Electrify America (EA) charge stop to 80%. I was able to do the trips in ~4hrs driving + ~20 minutes EA charging. About an hour less than each NAV calculated with 2 charge stops. After each of my "1st" charge sessions I was able to get the Nav systems to just get to the destination without a 2nd requried charge stop. (see next bullet point)

- After my charge session, Apple when selecting route on phone did provide me an option to arrive at destination at < 10%... which was nice since my destination (hotel) had charging. That said, on my return trip home Ford Nav also provided me an ability to arrive home at < 10% instead of forcing me to choose a path that redirected me to a charger before going home to arrive at > 10%. This was different than my previous experience with Ford nav... Im not sure if something changed in recent updates? A step in the right direction if so.

- On the outbound trip, I purposely went a different route vs the planned trips provided. I did this for 2 reasons a) I chose more 4 lane highway miles vs 2 lane highway miles due to more deer risk at this time of year as I was driving at night. b) My route would only add 10 minutes and would provide me 2 options for Electrify America stops instead of just 1 incase there was an issue at the 1st.

- Apple figured out that I was deviating than the NAV planned route and re-routed much more seamlessly. Im not sure Ford nav ever figured out that it should switch the route based on my deviations, it just kept trying to turn me around even when it was obviously much slower than the alternate it should have figured out. This would have been a major problem if it was colder and I needed to precondition the battery at the EA charger I wanted to use. Only being able to precondition the battery using Ford's horrible navigation is a problem, we need an option to manually precondition!

- A related question for those that use Ford nav, if you put in a DCFC location as your destination does the NAV system know to Precondition if the NAV thinks that is your "final destination"? or is that what the Charge assist app is supposed to accomplish?

- A little easter egg... When pre-planning on my Mac (or any apple device)... Apple Maps syncs with my trucks last known SOC% which is kind of a cool feature. (see attached screenshot of that)

Note: I have done this back and forth trip twice now with my truck and these have been my first EA sessions and all 4 of my EA charge sessions have been perfect with Plug and charge and good speeds.

Wish: Since doing the mental calculation of range/efficiency is essentially required because the NAV / GOM is so bad, I would actually prefer the remaining kWh to be displayed instead of state of charge % or the option to toggle it for driver profile.