2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid: Here's the Conclusion to 'Stranded!'

wait, they changed the oil and didn't check the battery health status?
Didn't you get a basic inspection (3 or 7 or whatever point inspection) with the oil change?

Usually in all the dealers I got my car for service, and I have been in plenty, battery is the first thing they check to increase their work and profit in case it is in bad shape. Then they through something about replacing the brake pads even if they are new...

Ford dealers make Honda stealerships look good...

The car was probably sitting with its light on or something like that during your prior service visit.

Agreed about not being able to drive it being ridiculous....even a regular car with a dead battery/good alternator can be driven once it is jumped off, etc....

It was an inconvenience that if it was your only car would have been a huge hassle.

So a low battery in what is essentially a new car causes it to freak out and strand you on the side of the road?

That is astoundingly bad engineering/design by Ford.

Yeah that sort of failure seems kinda of odd/bad, then again I'm not going to pretend I know much about Hybrid-based electrical systems. Wonder if the gas version of the Fusion would have had the same failure if the 12 volt battery was toast.

So it looks like the problem was with both the car and a miss on the dealerships part to give the car a full inspection. Who woulda thunk.

That just screams to me bad dealership. Whenever I've taken my Fusion Hybrid in for it's oil change(3 times now) the dealership I use checks both batteries, the 12V and the Hybrid battery.

Seems pretty lame that the dealership didn't check that.

Also for the people saying it's bad engineering by Ford, it's actually one of those 'things' about owning a hybrid car, it doesn't have a alternator so it has to trickle charge the 12V battery while driving, and IIRC it trickle charges from the hybrid battery.

At least it wasn't some part of the hybrid system.

My Subaru still has the original 10 year old battery, 96,000 miles later. Of course, leaving a light on is probably to blame, but it's weird that it would even start in that case. Does it use a standard alternator? I think a little more explanation on Ford's part is deserved here.

Modern cars can be REALLY finnicky about dead batteries. When my 2004 Mazda6's alternator was going out, the internal gauges were working intermittently, using an electric window would make the entire car shudder, and it eventually put itself into limp-home mode: the 4-speed automatic locked into third gear. Luckily, I was able to make it do a dealership.

About a year later, I came back to a dead battery in a parking lot. I managed to get a jump, but on the way home it started doing almost the exact same things as when the alternator was dying: gauges were freaking out, center console stack just shot off completely, and the entire car died completely just as I was able to pull into an Advance Auto Parts lot. Of course, it was the battery and not the alternator. Thankfully.

Of course, the 2004 Mazda6 was basically a Ford product. Maybe Ford's engineers create cars that are just REALLY sensitive to dead batteries.

"That is astoundingly bad engineering/design by Ford."

Wouldn't it apply to Toyota and Nissan hybrids as well, since all three use essentially similar systems and cross-license each others' technology? Toyota hybrid fans have even claimed in the past that Ford "stole" Toyota's technology.

"Agreed about not being able to drive it being ridiculous....even a regular car with a dead battery/good alternator can be driven once it is jumped off, etc...."

Not necessarily. My old POS Chevy Blazer suffered a complete electrical failure while at highway speed. EVERYTHING died at the same time (sudden loss of power steering at 75mph is a little unsettling, to put it mildly). This was after I had to jump-start the vehicle half an hour ago.

A battery should not start to "give out" in a car less than one year old.

@bc1960 -

well yes, i suppose it would.

however I'd still say its inexcusable that a low 12V battery leaves you stranded in any modern car. perhaps the dealer is partly to blame, but you're telling me that none of the engineers at any of these companies was able to foresee this potentially being a problem?

So,
A. Hybrids don't have an alternator to charge the battery while the car is in motion.
B. Hybrids' 12V battery gets charged from the electric motor big battery.

So why did the 12V battery not get charged and depleted to a low level trigging the car to crawl speed?

Is it just a faulty 12V battery or some electronic control module that lets the 12V being charged from the big battery in the back?

Why hasn't the 6 year old Prius with the 70k miles experienced such a failure? Did Toyota fooled Ford into buying a tricked version of their hybrid engines?

Thinking about it, the Prius doesn't drive faster than crawl speed anyway :p

@spacewilly - My 7 year old Subaru also has the original battery. Last test a few weeks ago showed it was better than its rating when new.
Seems now, a hybrid with a bad battery is going to introduce a whole new learning curve to those of us that expect to get a jump every day for a week until we change our old battery. Hum...

If the diagnosis of the Fusion is correct, I would not buy a Fusion Hybrid. If the diagnosis is correct for most, or all, hybrids, then I wouldn't buy any hybrid.

This is a serious problem that should not exist-- again, assuming the diagnosis is correct. We will find out over the next few weeks whether the dealer was correct. It is pretty typical for a dealer to jump at the most logical conclusion without a thorough investigation.

I would certainly like to hear from Ford about this.

"It is pretty typical for a dealer to jump at the most logical conclusion without a thorough investigation."

Because 99% of the time the logical conclusion is the correct one. If you get a flat tire they will not usually check the oil. I am sure they scoped the car and got the correct code. How hard is that? Way to many people are trying way too desperately to make this a bigger deal than it was. The battery failed...somebody got stuck....they got rescued safely....the car was fixed in a timely manner..... it was a huge pain in the ass. If a battery fails when any new car is running, it will sometimes strand the driver.....it just depends on how bad the battery actually was failing. If somebody says they will not buy a car if that happens then they need to get a bike....because sometimes it will happen.

2 days out of service for this is 2 days too long.

2 days is not timely.

no excuse, crappy engineering, both the car electrical system and the battery are POS

I have not yet talked to Ford (or Erin), but here is my guess: She had her problem only 2 miles from the office. If the 12V battery is necessary for engine starting (fuel pump?), and it was flat (or down a cell or two) from the get-go, then perhaps she simply drove as far as the smallish main hybrid battery would take her on electricity alone. Note the 99.9 mpg average -- a maxed out display. This indicates the engine hasn't been on and no gasoline has yet been consumed, I think.

With the engine unable to start, the car could not proceed in regular parallel hybrid mode, defined as direct gasoline engine power through the planetary accompanied by varying degrees of blended-in electric motor power that would be generated in two ways if the car were up and running: regenerative braking and series generation using surplus engine power and the second electric motor-generator.

For this to work out, the 12V battery can't merely be dead, it has to have lost a cell or been otherwise unable to accept a charge. The hybrid system would otherwise re-charge a "good" dead battery. Note that the 12V battery does not turn a starter - the main battery and electric motors crank the engine over in this car. That's why I'm guessing fuel pump or some other system that draws from the 12V battery (or in this case 10V or 8V) is what kept the engine from firing.

I'm sure there are holes in this theory. Feel free to point them out.

It's always a pain when you are stranded in any vehicle let alone a brand new one but let's be realistic here. The problem here was very minor and with millions of these batteries produced you are bound to have a dud every once in awhile. I just read that the Ford Fusion is now the highest rated mid size sedan by Consumer Reports above the Camry and Accord. Do you think the manufacturer of Fords batteries might also produce the batteries for these two vehicles too? Quite possibly! The reality is that new vehicles won't run with a dead battery. Hybrid or not. I know someone who had a 2006 F250 and another that had a brand new 2006 Dodge Ram that had bad batteries and were also left stranded. I do know that my old 1973 Gran Torino Sport will run even with a bad battery off the alternator. Ah the good old days! Unfortunately it only gets about 12 miles to the gallon :(

The big hole for me is:
Car has less than a year, that battery should have lasted way more than that!!!

The battery would have had to suffer a catastrophic death to not have enough power to run the fuel pump and coils. I guess it's possible.

I believe my CTS-V had its original battery at 100k, and is a 2005. It had noticeably less reserve capacity than it was supposed to and to my surprise it was covered under the CPO warranty because it did not pass the load test.

@actualsize-

Again I'll throw my knowledge of my own Ford Fusion Hybrid into the fray. As far as I can tell, the 12V battery basically, 1.) completes the circuit between the hybrid battery and the gas engine allowing the engine to crank, 2.) Runs a limited number of car accessories which as far as I tell are the radio, sync, along with mission critical type stuff, like the fuel pump. The hybrid battery handles pretty much everything else.

"For this to work out, the 12V battery can't merely be dead, it has to have lost a cell or been otherwise unable to accept a charge. The hybrid system would otherwise re-charge a "good" dead battery. Note that the 12V battery does not turn a starter - the main battery and electric motors crank the engine over in this car. That's why I'm guessing fuel pump or some other system that draws from the 12V battery (or in this case 10V or 8V) is what kept the engine from firing."

I think this is a really bad design.

2 yrs ago, my harmonic balancer broke. Fortunately, the engine didn't grenade itself. But I needed a new alternator. 2 weeks later, 100 miles away from home, saw boiling sulfuric acid from the battery. Must have been a bad voltage regulator. After I got a jump, I turned on every accessory and drove home. Even when the battery wasn't accepting a charge, all the engine accessories were powered by the alternator, as if there's nothing wrong with the battery.

I see no reason why the traction battery can't simply bypass the 12V battery and power up the engine systems, since the 12V battery is hooked up in parallel to the alternator in virtually every car on the road.

No experience with Hybrid's of any make, but plenty of experience with 12-volt lead acid car batteries. If a cell dies or "shorts" out, the batter can act erratically; to the point of exploding once jumper cables were attached (correctly) on my '97 Suburban. Further, a bad cell can be difficult to diagnose, even fooling the old load tests typically used to diagnose a battery's health. Not very confidence inspiring, but I'm not surprised that a partially electric car won't run when a source of electricity is disrupted.

chunky_azian says: I see no reason why the traction battery can't simply bypass the 12V battery and power up the engine systems, since the 12V battery is hooked up in parallel to the alternator in virtually every car on the road.

Ask what voltage that traction battery is, is it really 12V or 24V or even 48V (I think the Prius battery pack is this.) If that's the case then the engine systems that normally run off of 12V would get fried instantly from too much power and to make the systems able to run off of both 12V and whatever the hybrid battery is voltage is would add greatly to the cost and complexity of the system.

I think that the Fusion had a honest to god dead cell that could happen at anytime due to a manufacturing error or some unknown environmental error.

And considering the amount of electric power in a hybrid I would prefer a limp home mode then to try to keep driving potentially causing massive damage to the whole electrical system.

Not sure about the Fusion, but the Prius runs at 200 something volts, then it gets stepped up to 500 for the motors. No reason why it can be stepped down to 12V.

It is so funny that there are so many automotive engineers on here! Too bad Ford did not take some of the advice offered on here before they designed on of the most advanced cars on the market! Do us all a favor: before anyone else says this is a "bad design", please stop by and get and engineering degree AND spend several hundred hours studying the electrical system in the Fusion. It was a bad battery, nothing more...much to the disappointment of many on here.

"Not sure about the Fusion, but the Prius runs at 200 something volts, then it gets stepped up to 500 for the motors. No reason why it can be stepped down to 12V."

@chunky_azian, stop making random guesses on how HEV drivetrains work

The 12V system powers all the parts a normal car would. There is no alternator, the HV system is fed through a series of DC-DC converters and through the 12V battery. The stepped down voltage cannot be fed straight into the vehicles 12V line because it is a very dirty signal that would cause electronics to act poorly if work at all. The 12V battery acts like a capacitor to smooth out the power before feeding it to the vehicle.

To everyone else saying its bad engineering for a car to go crazy due to a bad battery needs to have their heads checked. If your battery is going out, no vehicle is going to work correctly. There is a federal regulation of tolerance where core electronics have to operate, outside of that you are SOL.

I am surprised the dealership didn't check the battery health during an oil change, this should be standard practice especially on a hybrid vehicle.

Could have been a bad apple of a battery from the factory. Anyone think of that? It happens. Parts fail. Does it suck? Sure does. But it is life.

Just to let you folks know, a Fusion Hybrid can make it to "Lost wages" without any problems. Earlier this year I successfully took my 2010 Fusion Hybrid to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway for the Sprint Cup race that weekend. Five people and 36 mpg average. I have 17,000 trouble free miles and no battery problems as of yet. Crossed fingers.

"wait, they changed the oil and didn't check the battery health status?
Didn't you get a basic inspection (3 or 7 or whatever point inspection) with the oil change?

Usually in all the dealers I got my car for service, and I have been in plenty, battery is the first thing they check to increase their work and profit in case it is in bad shape. Then they through something about replacing the brake pads even if they are new...

Ford dealers make Honda stealerships look good..."

My FORD dealership has a multi-point inspection they always perform on my cars and a battery check is ALWAYS included. I have no idea what you're getting at especially when I have had good experiences with all 3 separate Ford dealers I've been to throughout the years.

In a non-hybrid, a bad battery would mean that the car simply won't start. In the Fusion Hybrid, apparently it will run on electric power for a short time. That's a good thing, really. It could be enough to get you out of a dangerous area. Any car can have a bad battery. It happens, batteries die premature deaths, and it's ridiculous to blame Ford for that.

That said, why was there no warning until the car actually stopped working? And why was it so cryptic? That's something Ford's engineers could work on.

"Do us all a favor: before anyone else says this is a "bad design", please stop by and get and engineering degree AND spend several hundred hours studying the electrical system in the Fusion. It was a bad battery, nothing more...much to the disappointment of many on here."

Well I have an Electrical engineering diploma and I can tell you it's not a great design.

A dead battery is a common failure mode for any car and they should have thought of it.

I'm not concerned about the lead acid battery failing. They are very inconsistent, I've had them last more then 10 years and had them give out in 3 months.

Degree or not....I have to wonder how many folks on here complaining about how "flawed" the HEV system is have actually had the opportunity to work with one?

I can tell you from personal experience and working on both an upcoming mild and already released full hybrid system, it aint that easy...

"A dead battery is a common failure mode for any car and they should have thought of it."

they did, car goes to an electric only limp mode. Maybe they could be more clear on displaying the cause, but the system works fine.

"Degree or not....I have to wonder how many folks on here complaining about how "flawed" the HEV system is have actually had the opportunity to work with one?"

I'm working on what right now at work.

Quoting 06stang
"My FORD dealership has a multi-point inspection they always perform on my cars and a battery check is ALWAYS included. I have no idea what you're getting at especially when I have had good experiences with all 3 separate Ford dealers I've been to throughout the years."

Where I am getting is IF the 12V battery test was done and the battery passed then the battery should not have been the cause for this. Unless the kid that did the test didn't bother to actually do the test and just checked the box...

Degree or not....I have to wonder how many folks on here complaining about how "flawed" the HEV system is have actually had the opportunity to work with one?

I can tell you from personal experience and working on both an upcoming mild and already released full hybrid system, it aint that easy...

"Well I have an Electrical engineering diploma and I can tell you it's not a great design."

Really? How long have you studied the complete specs on this car? So you are saying that this system is "not great"? I would say the same about your opinion about it. Did you work on designing this car? How long have you studied in detail this system? Did you see the techs working on the car? How many Fusions have you worked on?

In other words nobody posting on here knows anything in detail about what happened and knows anything in detail about the Fusion hybrid system. So nobody on here can make anything more than wild guesses and accusations. Nice try though.

Ok, I'll admit, that I was making assumptions about its electrical system, based on the fact that Europeans are using HVDC power transmission, which requires stepping down to match existing consumer AC current. But we have an electrical engineering graduate saying that it's a bad design, based on the knowledge of what can be done, not what Ford had done.

As pointed out already, dead batteries happens. What I'm more concerned about is design priorities. Ford designed a system that uses perfectly good source of electrical energy to get the car to cruising speed instead of turning over the engine (can't that be done using the car's momentum by switching one of the generator's voltage?). Then the system let the car slow down on the highway around other cars.

When the battery dies, usually the car stays where it is. I'm wondering if one can breath new life to a Honda hybrid using traditional CPR (clutch popping restart).

"In other words nobody posting on here knows anything in detail about what happened and knows anything in detail about the Fusion hybrid system. So nobody on here can make anything more than wild guesses and accusations. Nice try though."

If are assuming automotive engineers don't participate on blogs you are mistaken

"If are assuming automotive engineers don't participate on blogs you are mistaken"

I did not say or assume that. Re read my statement. Nobody that has posted on this thread has any real idea about the details of what happened.....that is a fact, not an assumption. There was a huge effort by some on here to try and make the Fusion look bad since Fords have looked so good the past few years. It did not work. The basic design of the drivetrain is well tested and proven.

That kind of sucks that the 12V battery would kill the car in that fashion...adding to that battery going bad this soon to begin with. Wow.

"The basic design of the drivetrain is well tested and proven."

Maybe so but it's still bad that a brand-new car with 9k on the clock broke down and stranded its driver on the side of the freeway. I know that sh!t happens, but if everything I've read above is true about the 12v battery being dead beforehand, why wasn't there any kind of warning? That should have been an easily detectable condition by the car's systems.

"but if everything I've read above is true about the 12v battery being dead beforehand, why wasn't there any kind of warning? That should have been an easily detectable condition by the car's systems."

That was my point, Jay...nobody really knows what really happened. If something fails suddenly then how can their be a warning? Sometimes things fail with no warning....just like what happend to the Fusion.

@bodyblue, yes maybe no one knows what exactly happened, but there are plenty that know how the system works. I have been in and out of and/or seen logical or visual schematics of every hybrid on the road.

If insideline really wants to see what happened by trying to reproduce it, they should try a low battery and loss of battery test on it. Disconnect the alternator and just drive in a circle until the battery runs low, or they can add a remote switch on the ground of the 12V battery and while driving disconnect it.

my mistake there is no alternator, I wouldn't suggest trying to mess with the HV side of things anyway. You can still try the loss of battery test.

I can not imagine paying that much for a new car, only to get stranded on the side of the road. On top of that , withOUT the car I am paying HOW much monthly for, and for HOW Long?

"I can not imagine paying that much for a new car, only to get stranded on the side of the road. On top of that , withOUT the car I am paying HOW much monthly for, and for HOW Long?"

You have to be kidding, right? You cant imagine a problem with new car? It happens all of the time....why do you think dealers have service departments?

It was out of service for one day at the dealer. Damn quick service.

In any modern car the battery helps regulate voltage spikes. All cars are full of sensitive electronics that can be easily damaged if the power fluctuates too much. That is why in old cars, once started, could be run without the battery even installed, but in a modern car you could fri some expensive electronics.

Ford probably puts the car into limp mode so you don't fri some expensive parts over some something as minor as a defective 12V battery or as a safety consideration.

As for cars that have things like electric steering, most alternators/ generators are NOT strong enough to handle peek power loads in cars. If the battery is very low and you go to make a sharp turn in those cars with electric steering, the voltage drops too low for proper assist, and the position sensors give wacky readings and the steering can go crazy, engine cuts out, interior lighting fails, instrument cluster dies, ABS, ESP, SRS, CHECK ENGINE, and every other light under the sun activates from faulty codes.

Modern cars NEED a good, consistant voltage to function, hybrid or not.