I've been meaning to get around to the other side of the SmartGauge, to the right of the speedo. We've got 2 gauges here and a few readouts. The gauges are the fuel gauge and instantaneous MPG gauge. Then there is a bar chart. Let's start with the fuel gauge. What we have here is something that appears to be kinda a cutaway of a fuel tank, filled with gasoline colored liquid. The liquid is actually translucent. Well it's just a fuel gauge but arguably the coolest looking fuel on any car I've ever seen. I mention this to illustrate a point: it's like Ford took a hard look at every detail on the Fusion and said, "Now what can we do to make this better, more useful, cooler?" I like this kind of thinking. It reminds me of Apple's products, someone just wants to spend the extra time and money to add delight to a design. Probably most people don't care or notice but I think it's just great thinking. You see this throughout the vehicle. Oh by the way, the level on the fuel tank drop s-l-o-w-l-y.
Alright so let's get off of the damn fuel gauge. To the right is the instantaneous MPG readout. Lots of cars have a gauge like this but this one looks and works terrific.
Like some of the other gauges, the red needle moves in real time. It bounces up and down depending on how hard you are depressing the accelerator basically. Here's what it does when you switch from gas to electric: basically the red needle shoots to the top of gauge and pins at 60 MPG. Then about 2 seconds later, if you stay in electric mode, a little "+" sign fades in next to the 60 so it says 60+. Is that cool or what? I try to stay in 60+ as long as possible obviously.
OK, one other item here it's a data readout bar chart on the far right. Now, this is a user selectable and configurable item. The FusionH usually has a vine with leaves growing on it. I think I got all the leaves like on the first day. So you can drop the vine and switch to a moving bar chart. Each bar shows you what your MPG has been over the last period of time. You can configure it several ways and I liked setting it up so each bar is 1 minute. So what you see are 1 minute snapshots of what your MPG is. Useful? I don't know. Geeky? For sure. How many people have a constantly changing bar chart on their dashboard?
Two other smaller items to mention. First note where it says "mpg 65.0 avg". That is something you can reset anytime. If I go on a drive somewhere I frequently reset this right out of the gate and see how I do. This is a useful readout and it updates about once a second which is actually quite useful and cool. If you have a good charge in your battery and start off running on electricity you will "pin" this readout at 99.9 within a few minutes. What would be really crazy cool would be if Ford would put another digit on this so that it would go even higher.
The last item is the miles to empty. Looks like I've got alot of miles left in this tank.
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