He was spotted in the Downs neighborhood of Herndon. He wasn't afraid of us and were were able to bring him home safely. Please contact me if he's yours or you know who he might belong to. Thanks!
I picked up an older RadCity with only 160 miles of use. The bike itself works great but the battery goes from 4 bars to 3 bars and then just stops dead after about 25 miles using PAS 1. I'm guessing there's a bad cell or an issue with the electronics but don't really know where to start looking.
Is there anything I can do to troubleshoot or a reputable vendor that can service these batteries? It would be a shame to have to replace the whole thing at under 200 miles :(
I seem to have a problem adopting stray CRTs. The story goes that he's owned it since new and it's just been sitting in the garage for the last 20+ years. Late 90's model, geometry is slightly funky so it probably needs a recap but the color and brightness are excellent. Anyway, the price was right at $free so I couldn't pass it up!
I just got back from my first road trip of a little over 1200 miles from Virginia to Maine and back. It was a mix of country roads and highway with a few traffic jams thrown in for fun. A few thoughts, in no particular order:
Overall: the Mach-E is a terrific road trip car. It was comfortable, quiet, and just ate up the miles.
Charging: despite the 150kW max rate, it never felt like the stops were overly long. Just enough time to stretch the legs, hit the restroom, and grab a snack or bite to eat. I was able to extended the first leg out to 329 miles on a 100% charge (2024 AWD Extended) but other, higher speed segments saw miles per kW in the mid-to-low 3s.
Chargers: good grief there are a lot of charger brands out there. I stopped at 8 different place to charge and all 8 were different. Some required their own app, others offered a QR code and website, some were on the Ford network, and others I could just tap a credit card to pay. Two of them had broken card readers. A pretty mixed bag and a bit inconvenient dealing with all the different required sign-ups. DC fast charging stations are pretty sparse up in Maine, even around the Portland area.
Blue Cruise: I never want to do a long road trip without a self-driving car ever again. It was a godsend for all the times I had to sit in stop-and-go traffic around Boston, NY, and DC (over 90 minutes in total yesterday alone). BC generally performed well and never once braked suddenly for no reason or got confused by lanes merging or exiting. Only once in the entire trip did it drift and shut off when the highway divided into two without any painted markings.
One odd thing I noticed is that whenever I engaged BC it always instantly pulled the car over to the right edge of the lane before centering itself. That always felt a little odd. Also, if you're cooking along at 70 and traffic is stopped 1/4 mile up ahead and there are no other cars in front of you slowing down, it'll just race up to the stop at full speed. I never gave it a chance to see if it would panic brake or not but I do wish it looked further ahead and started slowing down sooner in that specific case.
Navigation: I used Google Maps via Android Auto. It's nice the turn-by-turn instructions show up on the gauge cluster and that the battery state is available to the app so it can plot a route to chargers. What bugged me a bit is that once it selected a charger location there really didn't seem to be any way to choose an alternative. One time it wanted to send me to a mall versus a rest area right off the highway. I would like a little more control over choosing where I want to stop based on the amenities, charger type and network, and distance from my route. Having a passenger operate their own phone to look at nearby charging stations solved this problem but when driving solo that isn't an option.
I recently picked up a 2024 Premium AWD extended range off a 1-year lease with just 2100 miles on the clock. Today was my first real road trip driving from Washington DC to Maine by way of PA and upstate NY.
Starting with 100% charge, I logged 282 actual miles on my first leg of the trip and ended with a reported 47 mi / 16% battery left. It was 100+ degrees out almost the whole way. This was on a combination of highway, country roads, and even several traffic jams and I used Blue Cruise pretty heavily.
Based on what I have read, this kind of range seems like the ideal case, not what I was expecting on a very hot summer day. So far I'm impressed with the car and have had a good experience with BlueCruise as well!
edit: oh, and I charged at V3 Tesla charger and had to take up 2 spots. Look for me on r/chargerdrama I guess P:
Pour one out for this original owner, garage kept, unmodified, 25k mile 2017 ST2 😥
Anyone know of a comparable example for sale or any like this that have sold recently? I figure I'm going to have to fight the insurance company to get a reasonable settlement given the condition.
This is my first ever SID composition so go easy on me! The C64 only has 3 voices which made it quite a challenge!