2017 Battery Issues

Jbodor · Jun 28, 2024

So, I loaned my 2017 FFE out to someone for a week and it has turned out to be a total nightmare. They ran the car completely dead (both the HV and the 12v) and left the car some place where it then got hit (luckily not to badly). It took me a few days to get a Tow Truck to get the car back to my normal dealership, and then weeks fighting with their insurance company to get repairs started. I now have the car back and it is behaving VERY strangely. Before this incident the Guess O Meter regularly showed between 85 miles of range and 130 miles of range. (Car has 65K miles on it) now I have had it back for about 4 days and driven about 200 miles and the guess o meter will not show above 50 miles of range. The same thing happens pretty much every time. In the first 30 miles the battery % Charged goes from 100% to about 65%, and then from 30 miles until about 50 miles the % charged drops like crazy where every 2 miles the % charged drops nearly 10%. I have an appointment to bring it back to the dealer on July 8th, but any ideas would be helpful. I don't understand how one incident of draining the battery can cause this much damage.

Anti_Climax · Jul 2, 2024

Sounds like you might have a cell that got kicked over the edge. You should be able to see the individual cell voltages as you discharge and confirm if one is misbehaving. If you leave it plugged into L2 for an extended period it supposedly begins a balancing routine that tries to normalize the charge of each cell group, but I haven't seen much to support that.

Jbodor · Jul 24, 2024

Anti_Climax said:
Sounds like you might have a cell that got kicked over the edge. You should be able to see the individual cell voltages as you discharge and confirm if one is misbehaving. If you leave it plugged into L2 for an extended period it supposedly begins a balancing routine that tries to normalize the charge of each cell group, but I haven't seen much to support that.

Thanks for the reply, I tried that for several days and have not gotten anywhere, actually it just kept getting worse I have dropped it of at my dealer for them to diagnose the issue. It was only getting 30 miles of range at 100% when I last tried (several days of sitting on level 2 charger)

Heima · Jul 25, 2024

Please let us know what becomes of the situation. Mine is starting to have strange battery behavior. Thanks

Jbodor · Sep 10, 2024

I wanted to post an update to everyone. My dealer (Bill Utter Ford in Denton TX) spent the last couple of months with the car after the incident. There was a lot of back and forth from what I hear from the service department. Especially because of the minor scuff on the front. The body damage was just minor (front bumper passenger fender and headlight.) but the HVB issue was more serious. There was no impact from the accident but some anomaly was causing the HVB to indicate an extreme degradation of range. The most range we could get either technician or myself could get was a projected range of 45 miles on a 2017 and the most actual mileage we could get was around 30 miles. This was very unusual so there was a lot of testing required. The technicians at Bill Utter ended up. Stranded 3 times and the car had to be towed back to the dealer because of the strange range ratings that were happening.

But after all tests were completed, ford elected to replace both the lower and upper packs of our FFE. And now I am seeing 130 to 150 miles of range in our around town driving of the car.

As an owner of a 2016 Ford C-Max Energi, and a 2021 Ford Mach-E Premium AWD EXT range I want to thank Ford and bill Utter Ford for putting in the effort and doing what is right and replacing our FFE battery. Like all of our previous cars we keep our cars for a long time and always repair them and maintain them at Bill Utter Ford and we have been taken care of. We loo forward to another 5-10 year of usage on our FFE and we can’t wait to get another ford BEV

I know this sounds like an advertisement, but honestly although it took a long time to get to where we are, we could not be happier. When we purchased our Mach-E we were seriously cross shopping the Tesla Model Y but with this resolution we could not be more adamant that Ford is the better BEV to buy.