Ford Mustang

(By the way, if you buy the car at Mike Maroone Longmont, be prepared to deal with your typical sleezy car finance person Andre, who will desperately try to sell you add-ons that are massively over-promised and over-charged. For instance, he went on at length discussing the importance of protecting your car's FRONT [which gets pelted by rocks on highways] with an adhesive bra shield. When I finally got my car, they had added the adhesive to a quarter of the hood and didn't touch the entire front of the car, which is the actual complicated part to cut and apply the adhesive for. Why spend so much time selling me protection to the front of the car, and then not actually apply any protection to the front? I had to take it elsewhere, where they charged me the same amount again for a job that was 100 times as complicated as the sticker Mike Maroone Longmont had applied to my hood. This type of thing happened repeatedly throughout the sales process, where they over-promise and under-deliver, screwing you every step of the way.)

When driving around on a road trip, you may be spending hours by a free charger, waiting to charge up. Ford did not think through the fact that you want to be comfortable temperature-wise when baking in the sun or waiting in the freezing cold (perhaps sleeping in the car while it charges up?). You can't turn the vehicle fully on when charging, but instead go into Accessory Mode, through which the air will flow but it won't respond to your temperature settings. This is a major oversight on Ford's part, failing to take into account that a key part of the electric car experience involves not just driving, but also hours of waiting by a charger. Anyone should expect to be comfortable in their car, especially after dropping $65k+ on buying the best. After literally months of leaving the car in the shop repeatedly so I can open a ticket and escalate it through dozens and dozens of phone calls to the engineers, they simply replied that nope, they won't fix that.

So that was one bug. Another is the phone as key feature which Ford advertises liberally, though it rarely works in practice. At times the car will indeed unlock when you approach it, so you can tell what Ford was aiming for, but more often than not you'll find yourself outside the car wanting in, frantically unlocking your phone, finding the Ford app, finding the unlock button, and waiting for another minute or so until the connection gets made. That's even when following their advice of keeping the app always open and allowing it to always track your location. The same is happening with the physical key.

Have a dog? You're in trouble. While Teslas have an easily accessible "dog mode" for when you're leaving it in the car, with automatic climate control kicking in and a helpful message to those passing by that "My owner will be back soon," if you leave your dog in the Mach-E even for a few minutes you will create a major scene, and completely freak out your dog. That's because the setting to turn off the alarm sensors simply does not work – your dog will move and the alarm will go off no matter what you do. I found out about this on a road trip where I had to leave Mia in the car repeatedly for hours at a time in a crowded camp site. Nothing I could do about it for days on end. Dozens of people quietly enjoying the beauty of nature ➡️ Mia moves ➡️ major ruckus with the alarm going off ➡️ Rush to the car to turn it off and try the setting again ➡️ Repeat a few minutes later ➡️ Do it again and again throughout the night. Biggest nightmare I've experienced.

There are other bugs of course, but just these are important enough to merit Ford's attention in properly diagnosing and troubleshooting. Here's where the second layer of a deeply flawed customer experience begins. I've spent dozens of hours at this point on the phone with Ford explaining these issues and trying to open tickets so their engineers can properly troubleshoot them. Most of the time the I get hung up on after being placed on hold for half an hour or so, and there have been many promises that someone from the Cars Support Team will call me back – I have yet to hear from anyone who can discuss the issue. Even when successfully escalating the call past their hard to understand phone screeners, they will repeatedly say you have to bring the car in to the dealer to address any problems with your vehicle, even though these are clearly software issues, rather than being hardware related.

As a result, the car has sat at the dealership for weeks at a time often during the past few months. At Mike Maroone Longmont you have to wait a few weeks to find an opening, and it always takes a few hours out of my busy schedule to bring the car in, wait to be seen, and then to pick it up. I've spent dozens and dozens of hours being bounced around the phone, listening to the annoying ad about their dealership while on hold. They are excellent there at shirking responsibility, and in the first few months I would be sent home with promises that everything was now fixed, only to realize that nothing actually was fixed, and in some cases was just made worse somehow.

Ford eventually acknowledged that there was a problem with the phone as key feature and issued a recall. (At Mike Maroone Ford they're still insisting that it all works as intended saying it was designed to require you to manually open the app each time, though the app clearly states: "Just walk up to your vehicle and open the door. No need to get out your phone.") and Having gone through the whole ordeal again to apply that update, surprise! The problem persists, now worse than ever. By the way, why can't these updates be applied over the air? Ford says you'd have to wait for months to receive that update over the air, so it's best to take the car into the dealership. They sent me a letter promising that the dealer would just come pick the car up and bring it back, but of course Mike Maroone Longmont says they're not set up for that (and can't do mobile repairs either), so you have to put in all the hours it takes to bring the car in and pick it up a week later, with nothing having actually been fixed.

My car is currently at the Mike Maroone Longmont dealership again. What's being done there to solve these issues? Not much, I'm afraid. They're shirking responsibility again saying that the phone as key feature works as intended. The dealership now finally acknowledges that the climate control bug is an issue (they previously sent me home saying it works as intended), but having told Ford about it the dealership received the feedback that Ford didn't design the car that way, wanting to "preserve battery" while it's charging by not allowing for any climate control. I mean, the whole beauty of being in the car while it's connected to power is that you should be able to use as much power as you want, and it won't run out.

The dealership did its best, but Ford does not intend on addressing the issue, which they regard as a fanciful wish rather than a core necessity. So I now have long road trips to look forward to where I'll be waiting in 100º heat or the freezing cold for hours while the car is charging, with no temperature reprieve in sight. Great investment of that $65k+. Oh, and sorry Mia, I can't take you on any more trips.