We were not the only ones to have trouble reaching 47 miles per gallon in the 2013 Ford C-Max Hybrid. A lot of people did, and complained about it. Ford heard those messages, and today officially announced it is lowering the official EPA mpg number for the car from 47 across the board to 43 mpg combined, 45 in the city and 40 on the highway.
To make it up to C-Max buyers, Ford will issue rebates. The amount isn't much – $550 to buyers, $325 to lessees – but it is better than nothing. In a conference call with reporters, Ford's Raj Nair, group vice president for global product development, said he did not know the total amount the rebate would cost Ford, but that 32,000 C-Max Hybrids have been sold, so that means the number paid out to customers will be somewhere between $10.4 and $17.6 million.
The reason that the C-Max got such a high, inaccurate number is because of something called the general label rule. Nair said:
Given that the real-world results for the C-Max are so much lower, Ford decided to take another look at it and, voila, 43 mpg. So far as we can tell, no changes will be made to the 47-mpg rating of the Fusion Hybrid. Official press releases from Ford and the EPA are available below.
To make it up to C-Max buyers, Ford will issue rebates. The amount isn't much – $550 to buyers, $325 to lessees – but it is better than nothing. In a conference call with reporters, Ford's Raj Nair, group vice president for global product development, said he did not know the total amount the rebate would cost Ford, but that 32,000 C-Max Hybrids have been sold, so that means the number paid out to customers will be somewhere between $10.4 and $17.6 million.
The reason that the C-Max got such a high, inaccurate number is because of something called the general label rule. Nair said:
These general label rules date back to the 1970s and they were created by the EPA to provide a means to generate fuel economy labels without having to test every single vehicle in the industry, which would have been impractical. The rules work like this: automakers generate a fuel economy label for a family of vehicles that share common characteristics, such as the engine and transmission and weight class. Tests of the projected highest sales configuration within that family, as specified by the EPA rules, are used to generate the general label.
The general label rules are a standard means of generating a fuel economy label and they are the source of most mpg label stickers on the road today. So, we used the general label rules to generate the fuel economy label for the C-Max Hybrid. The label was initially based on testing of the Fusion Hybrid, which was the highest volume vehicle as defined by the rules. This is why the C-Max's 47 miles per gallon label was the same as the Fusion Hybrid's 47 mpg label.
Given that the real-world results for the C-Max are so much lower, Ford decided to take another look at it and, voila, 43 mpg. So far as we can tell, no changes will be made to the 47-mpg rating of the Fusion Hybrid. Official press releases from Ford and the EPA are available below.
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