Mach-E Thermal System Nightmare

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey everybody welcome again to monroe live and today we're going to start off basically looking at the the front end of the vehicle i want to have a look at the the the frunk and compare it to the existing one that we have here from tesla um i want to look at how the cooling system works and i think it'll be kind of an interesting program the guys have told me that there's lots of stuff for me to look at so with that let me just go over here and we're going to remove the frunk so um let's let's pull this thing out corey get the acta valve oh oh thank god oh cory i think you just saved my life oh i can't believe it ah what just happened okay so we dramatized that a little bit but uh it was something that almost happened when i first saw the uh underneath the the frunk i i'm i was very shocked at how many hoses and how many other doodads are floating around inside this thing so let's go over here and just have a quick look the first thing that that i want to do is tell you what the different components are inside the product so over here we have the inverter the inverter is basically what runs the motor uh among other things down here we've got the motor in the gearbox over here we've got the compressor which i believe is a is as good as what we saw off the tesla i think it might be even a little smaller this is the dc dc converter this changes dc power from one voltage to another down here we've got the on-board charger and that's uh that's to make sure that everything is kind of like working from uh from your from your uh you know for the rest of the car um and then we have four pumps pump one pump two pump three and pump four now pump three and four have a heat sink um underneath them and uh and quite frankly um i don't i don't see that very often the last thing i want you to see is down here you can see that there's a four-way valve okay now connecting all this stuff together is this myriad of hoses and you can see that we've marked the flow characteristics for all of these different hoses so that we can try and figure out how this actually works so now that we're looking at the hoses let's let's let's look at how they have to be put together one of the banes of um uh of an engineer is cots commercial off the self components and when i look at this i look at a crutch i i don't like these things i don't like them because it's a good way to have an operator make a mistake so if we look at these components and i'll point them out right here this is a spring clip or a spring clamp there are 31 of those there are 14 different cots connectors and if we look at them this is going to be a t these um the straight ones are called nipples like down here the uh and then we've got um uh 390s and i can't see one right now but there's 390s in there as well these are a lot of different connectors that when i was in charge or not in charge but when i worked on the ceiling and fastening task force at ford motor company back in the in the 80s we tried everything we could to eliminate leaks and what we found was that these type of connectors they just leak it just happens that way so we tried to get rid of them the other thing we tried to get rid of was if you'll notice here box on top of box on top of box on top of box on top of box and then a and then we've got a cross card beam and then another box it just and then look at all these screws we have we can't count them all up we'll do that later on but the the deal here is that there's a there's a myriad of things that we just were shocked at the one thing that the one thing that i was shocked at was this it says on the back scrap if dropped and we have no idea what that product is so there's a lot of things that we need to look at in order to really understand why it is that ford did the things that they did so one of the little doodads that we saw that that kind of kind of surprised me was this these are sealed connectors and they're high powered connectors but for some reason or other there's a box over the top of them and i i really don't know why it's not like somebody i don't think is going to be able to get in they'd have to get through the covers that are over the top of this in order to get to that this just seems like a waste of money now we used to do a lot of work with ford at one time a long time ago and one of the things that we did was we talked forward into going to a plastic battery case so as i mentioned monroe associates does a lot of work for companies to try and help them reduce costs improve their designs and whatnot people say well why do you do that and are our guys smart enough and why not but things happen so this right here was the old ford corporate standard and this is what we proposed to ford now this was quite a while ago and you can see that this one's all plastic this one is steel on the bottom a bunch of bolts a bunch of fasteners and then a plastic top to go from this to this saved ford motor company two and a half million dollars in the first six months of influence implementation and that was using the old plastic injection molding old plastic injection mold and turning it into this i and that incorporated the investment change i'm happy to see that ford is basically at least kept that because this is an all plastic battery tray and and that's kind of a that's kind of a good thing let's just have a look at what we've got laying on the floor here these are the components and we're missing oh here let me just put this on here too oops so these are the componentry that are inside the uh the frunk so we're looking at a lot of bits and pieces and um and the first question is well how does that compare with tesla well this is tesla's they have a cowl piece that goes over in the front and the rest of it it just seals off into into the basically the body so this is kind of more a little more elegant design because it's got a lot less parts now one thing that we were totally stumped on was these drilled holes um these look like they were done at assembly you can see that they've got little tags and whatnot if i was going to oh and there's another one here so if i was going to if i was going to design this mold i would just have a pin in here and that pin would make that hole and i'd be done but these were all drilled in and so we didn't really understand what was going on and then we found out an interesting thing from one of the one of the people who were watching apparently initially this button for the hood release for the child i wasn't there and somehow they had to they had to do something to make sure that a kid couldn't get in and that's where this separator came for the uh for the prevention of anybody being able to get in here that was an expensive mistake for somebody not to make that happen so to the folks who basically give us information that we can't figure out thank you so much but this um this is a lot more parts than uh than than what we should have seen we should try our best to try and com combined as many parts as we possibly can at monroe we we actually it was that ford motor company that i actually invented most of the stuff that we do or used it and and if a part doesn't have to be a fundamentally different material or it doesn't have to move during the operation of the product's uh existence then it's supposed to be an elimination or combination of that part into other parts when we look at this we're looking at lots of parts and these guys don't have too many so let's have a look at what we see in here with all of this and look at what uh what tesla had so in essence this is the octo valve this is what we call a super manifold and these are two heat exchangers these all are in one relatively small package with only a few hoses that go from place to place that means a lot less leak paths these leak pads are something that are the bane of of construction especially if you're looking at trying to push a car out every 60 seconds or so that's what these guys are hopefully going to be doing because we want to make sure that or they want to make sure that the customers are happy and there's no leaks all over their floors i think that this could be packaged inside this vehicle something similar to this it might look a little bit different but certainly it won't look as complicated as that and it'll never have as many quality problems as far as leak pads are concerned so i really would like to say to ford if uh if you could it might be a good idea to really rethink this this will cut the cost it'll cut the weight because all those hoses are filled with fluid and fluid is a lot heavier than a couple of pieces of plastic in a die casting so at the end of the day um i'm not as pleased as what i was hoping to be when we pulled the uh pulled the frunk out but i can tell you for sure that this is better than the id4 and although we didn't take too much time to pull out the the frank and whatnot from the uh from the polestar 2 i'm pretty sure that the ford will easily compete with that one as well it's just that these are these are things that that that should be addressed and soon now i will tell you that tesla changed from what they had with the uh with the um super bottle to this process and they did it in less than a year um that's a challenge that ford motors companies should be taking on right now and hopefully hopefully they'll be able to make it as a running change in both the uh in both the uh the mustang here and uh the lightning the f-150 lightning so anyway thanks very much for watching everybody um we'll talk to you again we've got lots more uh going on and um and uh like i say if if you uh if you're of a mind just been reminded uh please hit the subscription button thanks so much thank you have a great day you

Channel: Munro Live

Views: 485,075

Keywords: EV, BEV, Sandy Munro, Munro, Electric Vehicle, Benchmarking, Electric, Insight, Lean Design, Design, Comparison, MunroLive, MunroLive.com, ElectricCars, Review, Car Review, 2021, Automotive, Automotive Review, Ford, Mustang, Mache, Mustang Mach-E, Mach-E, Ford Performance, Teardown, Tear Down, Teardown Titan, Frunk, Hood, Thermal System

Id: C1dQtlrI7uU

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/The-Corinthian-Man]

Technically this breaks the title rule: post titles must match the title of the linked content exactly, no editorializing. I think in this case it's very minor and doesn't really add any bias, so I'm going to leave the post up. But please in the future be sure to match the titles.

[u/Swigy1]

Wow. Sandy is totally right. That’s a rats nest of coolant lines.

None of those hoses are adding any value to the cooling system, aside from moving the coolant around. They aren’t cooling/heating/regulating the fluid temperature.

To be fair, this is Fords first real foray into electric vehicles, and first year vehicles always leave room for improvement. Let alone an entirely new concept of a vehicle. This implementation, while not elegant at all, is better than the other Tesla competition.

Hopefully Ford really does lean into improvements. Or the Mach E will be known as a coolant spewing spigot.

[u/avioneta]

Imagine my shock.

[u/courtlandre]

TLDW- It's pretty bad compared to Tesla.

[u/bozo_master]

Hopefully Ford gets a solution down the factory before all 50k of the first run is built.

[u/Protagonista]

Ford Production Meeting:

Engineering: It's too complicated and expensive to build, we'll never be able to scale it!

Management: That's the whole idea. The business is Coyote V8's, Raptors, and Mustangs. This EV thing is a sideshow. It's like a vegan salad at McDonalds because they've been forced to "do something." Well, this is our "something" and it makes us look "sophisticated" according to the PR shitwits, so go eat your sprouts and STFU. I'm going back to the world of men now.

[u/Pokerhobo]

This is the big advantage of Tesla vs legacy automakers. Legacy automakers which are not as vertically integrated as Tesla have long contracts with suppliers to keep costs down, but it means they have a large supply of existing parts they can reuse, but makes it more complicated than it needs to be. Instead, Tesla is willing to make big changes in production to improve the product and/or lower costs (complexity, weight, etc...). Legacy automakers and suppliers will eventually catch up to where Tesla is now, but will always be behind.

[u/cacboy]

Hopefully this setup makes it into the F150.

[u/DonQuixBalls]

Oh come on Sandy, can we not do the clickbait thumbnails? We're all fans already, this isn't helping. :(