Tom's Blog: 10/16/22

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Bronco Across America

Cross posted to the Bronco6G page: https://www.bronco6g.com/forum/threads/bronco-across-america.56935/

Drove (almost) across the country a few weeks ago (San Francisco to Atlanta). It wasn’t a direct route. I went through lots of beautiful places, including Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Badlands, Mount Rushmore area, etc.

For the record: I have a ‘22 Black Diamond, two-door, 2.3 liter, manual transmission. Its nickname is “Azulejo,” which roughly means bluebird, or could refer to those blue tiles you’ve probably seen but didn’t know the name of. The Bronco was fairly heavily loaded during the drive.

Bronco did pretty well, although it’s definitely not optimized for highway use. Mileage was in the low 20s, but dropped as low as 17 mpg on some tanks. Surprisingly (but not really, when you think about it) mileage was lowest on long highway days, especially in windy conditions. Driving at low speeds got the best mileage by far. Examples would be construction in Chicago with low speeds, maybe 40 mph, even coming to a standstill once in a while, and driving at a leisurely pace through Yellowstone. You’d think stop and go driving would drive mileage down, but that doesn’t hurt mileage nearly as much as the Bronco’s (lack of) aerodynamics.

Indicated mpg from the trip odometer was consistently 0.5 to 1.0 mpg better than actual mpg when measured against the gallons poured into the tank. Or, maybe gas stations are very well calibrated to read high, but not so much that they get in trouble…

Stats are as follows, from gas records, although this includes a small amount of driving before and after the main drive: 3785.8 miles, 187.6 gallons, 20.2 mpg, $774.47 total fuel cost. I did sign up for a discount deal with “76” gas stations, for which I got a $0.25 per gallon discount by giving them my credit card info and buying through their app. This also covered Conoco and Phillips 66 stations.

The Bronco drove extremely well on the highway. And it was super comfortable. I never once felt like I needed to stop because I was sore or stiff. I have my complaints about the Bronco, but comfort is not one of them. This came in handy on the final leg of the drive, Milwaukee to Atlanta, which was over 800 miles.

Now some negative items.

I experienced this when going at high enough speeds and hitting certain bumps.

2 Door Window Rattle/Knock

https://www.bronco6g.com/forum/threads/2-door-window-rattle-knock.56718/

I don’t like that the HVAC system seems to turn on the AC compressor by default when you choose to blow air on the windshield (front defrost). Sometimes I just want a light flow of air, I don’t want to run the AC! Ford should at least turn on the AC light if it does that, but it just does it silently. I’d rather have full manual control, personally. I’m smart enough to know that if I really need to defrost the windshield in a warm situation I need AC to help dry the air as well.

At one point the bright/dim headlight function didn’t work. Pull the lever, push it, nothing. Turned lights off (while driving at night) briefly then quickly back on. Boom, bright/dim works again. Only experienced that once.

Another time, when switching between a podcast and Sirius XM radio, the left side speakers just went quiet. Turned off the radio, then back on, worked fine.

The “play/pause” button in the center stack didn’t work at times. Maybe this was just for the one podcast app I was using (?), because it has worked in other situations. I’ll have to research this one a bit more.

Infotainment locked up from time to time. Appears to get overloaded, particularly when using Google Maps in conjunction with podcasts, phone calls, etc. Seemed to be better when using Waze, for what it’s worth. In any case, it’s certainly useful to learn how to reset the infotainment while driving (press and hold power and forward skip buttons) because you KNOW it will lock up.

Fans seemed to speed up for a while, then go back to normal speed, without ever touching the fan speed setting. Happened for a while one day then I don’t remember it after that.

It appears that Ford electronics kind of suck, if you ask me. Not inspiring for the long haul.

When driving through some extended rain and wet weather I noticed that the gas pedal was a little sticky. I would feel it be a little grabby if I lifted to slow down. Only happened in wet weather. I had never noticed that before, but until a few weeks ago the Bronco had lived in California so there you go.

Finally some pictures. It was hard to narrow them down, and for this post I chose pictures with the Bronco, of course. There are some beautiful places in this country. The Bronco was a great way to see them.