2021 Mustang Mach-E Driveway Test | Digging into the details

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A recent week in a 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E First Edition provided a convincing demonstration, as it has convinced my colleagues, that this is an EV all of America can get behind. It has the looks, full stop, no need to qualify it as good-looking "for an EV." It has smooth, plentiful power. It offers the somewhat-tall crossover ride height Americans love. It has the nicest interior of any Ford you've ever been in — you could almost say luxurious. This AWD model is EPA-rated at a range of 211 miles (RWD models are rated at 230), but it can certainly exceed that. If Ford plays its cards right, the Mach-E will be a smash hit.

During a fun week driving it, I became curious about some user-experience details, the way one might really drill down if serious about buying the car. Not criticisms, just points of curiosity. So what follows are a few observations, along with some questions and actual answers from a Ford engineer. We've already discussed how the Mach-E drives in our first review and in subsequent driving reviews here and here and here. So this post is strictly about the small stuff.

The doors

A curious thing about the Mach-E presents itself before you even step inside. To open a door, you push a small round button, which causes the door to pop ajar. On the front doors, there is a handle — well, not a handle like we're used to. It's more of a fixed metal lip or hook (shown at left above), that you can grab to pull the door open. Meanwhile, the rear doors (at right) don't have such a handle, but that's no problem: The door pops open enough that you can easily grasp the inside edge and open it the rest of the way.

Personal opinion here, but the front handle/hooks, while unobtrusive, are unnecessary. You'll find yourself just grabbing the inside edge of the front door, since that's what you do in back. It would be sleeker to just leave the handles off.

No eco

When you start the car, you'll notice there's no eco meter on the Mach-E's instrument cluster. Usually an EV has a gauge that offers immediate feedback on acceleration and regeneration. Press the accelerator, needle goes up; hit the brake, needle goes down — truthfully, it doesn't offer much useful information. And that was Ford's conclusion in skipping it.

"We wanted to balance the information customers care about with the amount of information display space we have," said Leeway Ho, Ford's engineering supervisor for the Mach-E. "The goal was to provide information that was valuable to the customer without detracting from the aesthetically pleasing digital design we had chosen."

What the Mach-E provides instead, displayed on the infotainment screen, is a "How's my driving?" cumulative percentage rating of your trip acceleration, deceleration and speed.

Range impressions

You don't have to baby this car, don't have to sweat over every acceleration or, literally, sweat over every degree of temperature on the climate controls. It has plenty of range. For reasons I'll explain momentarily, I didn't perform a full weeklong range test in the Mach-E. But one backroads evening drive of 78 miles consumed 28% of battery, at a rate of 4.2 miles/kWh. At that rate, a full 100% charge of the 68 kWh battery would equal a range of 278 miles. Now, 4.2 m/kWh is driving economy that's either extremely good or extremely lucky. The terrain that night was rolling hills, and the ambient temperature was mild, so conditions were favorable. (Other outings were in the range of 3.6-4.0.) But let's work the equation in the other direction: To match the EPA's 211-mile rating, the least you would have to achieve is 3.1 miles/kWh, which should be doable by anyone, in anything but extreme conditions.

Trip computer

This press car's trip computer tripped up plans for a full range test. The computer has three options: "This trip," along with Trip 1 and Trip 2. It turns out that "This Trip" meant only a leg of a trip. If you stop somewhere along the way for lunch and turn off the car, the data resets to zero. After losing a couple of hours of data that way, it was clear I'd need to use Trip 1 or 2 going forward; however, attempts to reset those merely cleared the mileage and duration numbers — the miles/kWh calculation would not zero out. It remained stuck on 3.0 kWh (as seen in the video above), which perhaps was a cumulative figure for the nearly 4,000 lifetime miles on the car. (If so, that's a decent number considering how many automotive writers have had a crack at flogging this vehicle.)

Ford's Ho thanked me for flagging the issue and said his team would look into it. Now, this Mach-E was a preproduction model, so in fairness the problem could have been unique to the vehicle. To check that, I dropped into a local Ford store to try it on a production car. Resetting Trip 1 cleared the numbers — good news. But then an attempt to reset Trip 2 turned up the problem. Confusing things further, after making two or three more attempts, the m/kWh tally finally cleared. This is a minor issue that will presumably be addressed in an over-the-air update. But for my week in the preproduction car, fully tracking range and driving efficiency wasn't in the cards.

Charging

After charging the Mach-E for a day and night, it went to 96%. Which was a pleasant surprise — as you probably know, for battery longevity automakers usually suggest charging to just 80%. Somewhere within their infotainment systems there is a charging user interface you can use to set the 80% limit. But I could find no such setting in the Mach-E.

Ho explained: "The vehicle software manages charge rate and level, taking battery life into consideration. For example, while DC fast charging, the vehicle will slow down the charge rate once the battery reaches an 80% state of charge."

So no worries, the car figures it all out. Because I had snail-charged the Mach-E from a 120-volt outlet, regarded as the most battery-friendly charging rate, the car was happy to permit a full charge.

The shifter dial