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My "Energi Plug In" is a LEMON - BEWARE - CA LEMON LAW - revised


BlakeMastersEnergi
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Thanks for the advice! I desperately need the green HOV sticker and all have been given out in Cali, so I would have to buy a used car as a replacement if I want another vehicle with the sticker. I have been real nice to my dealer, but usually after 5 days I kind of get a little worked up because the rental doesn't have a sticker and the car functions as a mobile office. The other dealer close to me only has a few service bays and didn't want to mess with a problem that they saw the my dealer worked on. That's why I kept bringing it back to where I purchased it. I am going to follow both of your advice and bring it to a different dealer for service. I love the car, just want it to go from A to B :)

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Thanks for the advice! I desperately need the green HOV sticker and all have been given out in Cali, so I would have to buy a used car as a replacement if I want another vehicle with the sticker. I have been real nice to my dealer, but usually after 5 days I kind of get a little worked up because the rental doesn't have a sticker and the car functions as a mobile office. The other dealer close to me only has a few service bays and didn't want to mess with a problem that they saw the my dealer worked on. That's why I kept bringing it back to where I purchased it. I am going to follow both of your advice and bring it to a different dealer for service. I love the car, just want it to go from A to B :)

 

I would've almost bet my bottom dollar that you absolutely loathe the car.  Every post is pretty much appended with "This car is a piece of ____", or some other kind of insult.  As a result, my impression of you LOVING the car is a total 180 from your comments.

 

The green sticker is a huge WANT, not a need.  You need a vehicle if you travel so many miles (and many people do without cars in big cities), and I think you said you go 100 miles a day.  Traveling from A to B faster is a want.  If a freeway is backed up and you're in a parking lot for 30 minutes, why not use your phone or vehicle NAV and find a surface route that may get you to your destination quicker?  FatFusion indicated that the HOV lanes are starting to become part of the problem too, so you may need to find an alternative at some point regardless.

 

Michigan freeways turn in to parking lots at 7am and 5pm every weekday in the big city.  Instead of taking the freeway, surface streets get me from A to B with less time and stress.  Going 40MPH is better than 5!

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Blake, sorry you arent getting the fellowship or whatever you want to call it on the forums, some people can be a little harsh and not sure why they post if they arent going to be helpful or give meaningful insight to things. You are going thru a rough time dealing with the dealership/Ford. Have you contacted the BBB (Better Business Bureaus)? They can help, or help to point you in a better direction. I drive in the #2 worse traffic in the US and I'll agree that the sticker is a "want", but when you fork over $30K and most of the time, the car is at a dealership, I'd want someone's butt too.

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Mine was $41k, and I am in a legal battle right now. Don't mean to dis everyone's Ford on the site, just stating a fact that "mine" is a lemon. Hopefully, everyone else has a good one. 

 

Most everyone has a good one, however with more complexity in cars these days it can take just one small thing to create havoc that shows up in various systems - and sounds like they haven't found that one little thing in yours yet, and of course that's very frustrating.

 

When reading about the saga, I thought to myself that it sounds kinda like the past owner who had all sorts of crazy symptoms (don't know that they are exactly the same) and the culprit turned out to be a "pinhole" in one wire that caused corrosion and all sorts of problems.  So I searched the forum on "pinhole" and below is the thread that I recall, you can scroll upward on that thread and see if the symptoms are similar to yours, most likely not but does illustrate how one little thing undetected can cause big problems.

 

http://www.fordfusionenergiforum.com/topic/2036-wont-start/?p=13908

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Mine was $41k, and I am in a legal battle right now. Don't mean to dis eveyone's Ford on the site, just stating a fact that "mine" is a lemon. Hopefully, everyone else has a good one. 

 

I think most of us on the forum have a good one.

 

I know how frustrating it can be to have a brand new vehicle, especially after dropping a small fortune on it, not live up to expectations.  This forum is for everybody to share their issues, fixes, and enthusiasm, so when another person picks up one of these cars, they may hopefully find their questions and potential resolutions already answered here.

 

Others have had wild 'n crazy problems, as Jeff_h's link shows.  There are tons of Focus Electric owners who have had nutty issues as well.

 

Seems like you already had a full head of rage steam when you finally joined the forum and voiced your issues.  I just wish it was presented a little more conservatively, but that's just me.  I am still very interested to learn what the fixes will be for your car, and hopefully those fixes will help another person who may come along.  I do wonder how you managed to trash 2 transmissions though.  :)

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We had a lemon FFH. So we traded it in rather than fight for lemon law. I researched the calculation for a lemon law settlement & decided that the time investment to keep taking it to the dealer and fight for lemon law would not be worth the few extra dollars we'd get with a successful lemon law claim. So we just negotiated aggressively and got well over KBB value for trade in.

 

Maybe you can do the same? Find a dealer who doesn't know about your issues and see how much you can get for the car. Then you can get another car that doesn't have issues.

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  • 1 month later...

That is the process i had to go through with Audi on a buyback. I had far worse issues than this person did. I spent over 500k in 6 years with Audi and they treated me like I was crap. I took the car 12 times the dealer to fix issues, The dealer was on my side (mostly). Audi kept claiming I was doing something with the ECU (such as a modified ECU for more power from the turbos).

 

Finally they agreed to my demands when I had just picked it up for the 13th time for the same issue and still hadn't left the dealer's lot and the CEL was on again. I pretty much went nuclear at that point. I called my attorney, the BBB, news stations, etc. Called the zone rep for Audi, national office, German office, etc. It took them almost 2 months to process the buy back and still acted like I was the issue. 

 

Long story short, they sent the car back to Germany to figure out the issue. Someone had swapped the connections for the O2 sensors when building it so it the right bank sent signals to the left side controller and vice versa. I would have been happy if they fixed the car ultimately but Audi's response and treatment of me so put me off on the brand I"ll never buy another one of their products (or related firms) again. They lost a ton of me as up until that time, 90% of all my cars had been Audis over the past 15 years. The dealer was really PO'd that Audi wasn't doing enough to resolve this and they were sort of caught in the middle. So now Audi is never on my radar to buy anything. I really liked the R10 but based on their treatment of me I ended up going with Lexus and Toyotas until the last few Fords I bought.

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Answering your question would be a violation of an NDA.

Any NDA I've ever been involved with prohibited even telling anyone that I was under an NDA.

Umm, even that, you just violated the NDA. ;) Its like my job.."I can neither confirm nor deny that I am not authorized either to confirm or deny that I cannot disclose anything that you would then have to confirm. In any case, I would deny it. Got it?" from Siri"

Edited by lonzo71
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Umm, even that, you just violated the NDA. ;) Its like my job.."I can neither confirm nor deny that I am not authorized either to confirm or deny that I cannot disclose anything that you would then have to confirm. In any case, I would deny it. Got it?" from Siri"

 

Not really.  He didn't state what the NDAs were actually for. :)  THAT would violate it.

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I find it amazing he managed to go through 3 transmissions on a vehicle that doesn't technically have a "transmission" in the traditional sense.  You'd think with a vehicle that doesn't shift the drive train would be more robust than usual.

It may not have been a transmission problem.  I went through 3 transmissions in a previous (non-ford) vehicle only to have the shop finally discover a loose wire in the ECM connector.

Edited by Doug0716
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  • 3 weeks later...

I had a nagging issue with my 2013 Energi around the electric heater and go times, and they just said out of the blue "Ford is going to buy your car back". This was after MANY visits to the dealership. I live in Ohio.

 

I replaced it with a 2016 identical Energi. I could have got any car of same MSRP or lower, which included a Mustang convertible or a Loaded up Explorer. Even with gas going from $4 to $2.50, I still went with the Energi.

 

As much as you want to swear Ford up and down, I was impressed on how they ultimately took care of me.

 

It was frustrating that the dealers don't know how this new tech works, but at the end of the day, Ford did the right thing for me and for that I value them as a top tier Auto Maker.

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