Thread by @greentheonly

With all the brouhaha about Ford Mach-E, I decided to test-drive one.
Local Ford dealer had one in stock even (Ford >> Audi)
I got a salesperson that was first time in the car so we had to use manual a lot (Tesla >> Ford)
Manual depiction of UI does not match the actual UI 🤷‍♂️

The good:
I feel like it's ready to replace model 3/Y If you don't need to ever drive outside the city you live in.
Not as fast as a Tesla but plenty enough for light-to-light hopping.
Has wifi hotspot built-in ($$$)
Bird-eye view that actually works and turns on as you approach

Ford ADAS is on par with Tesla BAP. Better for lane-changes where it lets you to take over without disengagement, but a bit flip-floppy in the lane in turns as if steering angle is severely limited.
10 seconds between steering nags at 80mph

The UI is a bit confusing. "READY"?

It has a bunch of service centers everywhere (dedicated techs to service the EVs I was told) which is important if you don't have a Tesla service nearby.
There's a built-in organizer in the frunk which is nice. Though looks hard to remove if you need space in one piece.

The bad:
The UI needs lots of work!
Various important information is not obvious how to get to or just straight unavailable (e.g I have not found the rate of charging)
Manual is snappy but incorrect. There's no settings until you go to profile for example. Drawer? No pictures?

lots of useless animations in the UI that keep the screen in useless transient state. No back button and apps are full-screen for the most part - lots of error-prone touches/swipes needed to navigate.

Routing by charge station is a joke and feels like a bolt-on. First you select the route then it tries to work in chargers, uses strange slow chargers all the time, huh?
Like I want to spend 5 hours charging at some dealership instead of fast EA station in Chattanooga

The traffic information on the maps does not work even though the option is turned on.

There's also a totally separate map application to view where the chargers are, huh?

the big screen is mounted dead-center, so it's really inconvenient to view it from both front seats.

random glitches like this example of a backup cam distorted movement, that disappeared after a bit of driving.

The ugly:
Charging still remains a big question mark.
No matter how much you tell me "EA is great", I tried it.
The first cabinet was out of order though it took me some time to realize it

then we get to another cabinet and after some fumbling and errors we found that the car needs to be "started" for it to work.
Must unplug and replug. The connector locks in the port and you must press a button to unlock which took a bit to figure too
All one time learning stuff

Then we were able to start charging at whopping 83kW based on the screen info (kinda low for 50%SoC and 350kW advertised station I think?) and then it abruptly terminated 44 seconds in. (do they make such hard to photograph screens on purpose I wonder?).
At least it was free.

btw that "charge station fault" alert stayed with us until on-the-wheel "OK" button was pressed well into a driving session where it long stopped mattering.
Did I say Ford needs to think to do something about UI yet?

Compared to the X second row is tiny and overall storage space is small (but X is a bigger car)
You can barely insert your feet under front seats compared to the X where there's plenty of space.

Car seat access in the X is another world!

Driver seat is kind of low in the Mach-E and so your knees go high, OR you can sort of lift the seat, but then if you are a big high like me - the view is obstructed a lot by the roof.
Doors have buttons to open, but no motors to fully open, pity. So much potential lost.

No handles! I wonder what to do in emergency to open from outside?
Front doors have a finger-nook to pull, but not the rear ones that are 100% button-operated.

For all the flak Tesla got for their unsafe doors, I don't see how these are any safer.

Overall as you can see most of cons are software, I saw a "software update" tab so I hope responsible people at Ford are working overtime addressing all these issues and pushing fixes to the fleet.

well, the picture inserted here is wrong, here's the charge start error

btw forgot to mention. when you start navigation, the most annoying CYA message ever is played to keep attention and and be careful blah-blah. Every single time!
I imagine you can't even turn it off?

another note on charging. The car was plugged into L2 charger at the dealership. I asked them (there was a more experienced person present at first) how fast the charger was. They told me it was $500.
Then when pressed said the charger was fast enough to recharge to 80% in 30 min

it really did not help that there was not anywhere to see the charging rate (we spent 10 minutes looking!)