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Ford Focus Electric

I'm quite active locally with the electric vehicle (EV) community locally, in particular going to various public events (e.g. green living festivals, parades, etc.) to advocate for this technology.  Along those lines, the local club of EV enthusiasts was invited to a private Ford event where they were bringing the new Ford Focus Electric (FFE) to town and making it available for test drives.  No way I was going to pass that up, as it was the first time that the public could ever drive one of these new FFE's, which are slowly making it to market this year.

The event was held on May 16, 2012 at the Atlanta Zoo, which is kind of an odd place but apparently the event was in partnership with the city and provided a scenic neighborhood (Grant Park) for the test drive.  They had some sort of presentation / panel event inside the zoo facility proper but I couldn't get there until 1pm so my experience was limited to just looking at (and driving) the cars in the parking lot.

The Ford Focus Electric is a pure electric car, with a range of about 100 miles, like the Nissan Leaf.  But that's where the similarities end, because the car is a step up in many regards, including styling, charging speed and engine power.  It's also quite a big step up in price -- $40K, compared to $35K-ish for the Nissan Leaf and $40K for a Chevy Volt which has the gas engine and thus is much more useful.  Note that all of these qualify for the federal tax credit of $7500, and the pure electrics (Leaf and FFE) also qualify for a $5K state tax credit (which the Volt does not qualify for).  Therefore the net purchase cost of an FFE is actually $27.5K .  So please don't whine about the $40K cost of the car, as it doesn't actually cost you nearly that much in the end!

But all that aside, my purpose at this event was to get a good feel for the car, to experience how it drove, things that you can't learn by reading about it.  They had two or three FFEs there for test drives, and I actually ended up getting two opportunities to drive -- the first with a Ford rep and another person in the car, and then another run all by myself (wheee!).

Observations from my test drives:

• The car had less power than I expected; on paper this looks like a powerful car, but it seems to be tuned less for low speed acceleration and more for high speed cruising.  So around town, it is way less fun than my Volt.  I was really surprised by this.
• The accelerator "tip in" was pretty awful, very jerky.
• The braking is discontinuous.  In electric cars, the same motor that accelerates the car can be used to decelerate (brake) the car.  So when you press the brake pedal, it's actually the motor that slows the car down at first; as you press harder, the car starts to blend in the disc brakes.  This is far more efficient than just using the disc brakes like regular gas cars, because the motor braking "regenerates" power back into the batter.  But the car needs to carefully blend the two braking modes or it feels weird, and it definitely felt weird in the FFE.  It felt to me like the regen was only kicking in a full second after I started pressing on the brake, so I would get a kind of stuttered braking effect.  Very disconerting.
• The D and L transmission modes were indistinguishable to me.  "L" mode in electric cars is typically used to add more regen braking upon accelerator lift (before you move your foot over to the brake pedal).  People used to driving performance cars love this because it similates the effect of engine braking, and allows you to drive with just the accelerator pedal.  The FFE appears to have very weak L mode regen braking.
• The interior is very nice.  The steering wheel tilts and telescopes; heated seats are standard; Ford offers optional power seats with leather.  Everything on the car is standard except for the power/leather seat option and some premium colors, so Ford has followed GM and Nissan by basically throwing nearly everything into the car.
• Due the odd battery placement I mentioned above, there's a lot of weird, wasted space in rear.  The trunk is pretty rotten, and there's a compartment with a lid that interferes with the seats.  I didn't fold seats down to see what that looked like, but it was generally a mess back there.
• The 110V charger cord is using 16 AWG wiring, which is pretty thin wiring.  GM had 16 gauge wiring on their first generation charging cords, and a lot of people had problems with them; GM eventually replaced them for everybody, with the new one having thicker cords.  Ford will probably end up having to do this too.

Taking the longer view again ... There are a number of concerns one should have when considering this car.

First, it's a conversion, meaning Ford basically takes a regular gas Focus and put an electric drivertrain into it instead of a gas drivetrain; the most noticeable manifestation of that is that big battery block plopped into the trunk and messing up the usable volume back there.

Second, Ford only plans to make the FFE in small quantities for now, which generally indicates a lack of committment to the car and the technology, as if they are doing it only because they have to (google for "compliance car").

Third, it's overpriced, if you compare it to the Leaf and Volt, and I think this is actually related to the second item -- Ford isn't going to make many, so they decided to price it high because they know they can probably easily find a thousand or so people that are EV fans and Ford fans.

 In all, it's a nice looking car but it's got a lot of problems, and clearly Ford is just tiptoeing here.  Hopefully future model years will improve it.  Certainly it does get Ford started on the path, and positions them to be ready to react when EVs really start to take off.  Which is inevitable, trust me :)

Ilse "Omi" Conrad, 1917-2012

After a long illness, my grandmother Omi died last week.  She was 94.

Born in East Prussia in 1917, she managed to survive World War II with her family intact.  This included a harrowing escape from Konigsberg in early 1945 with her three young daughters in tow, just barely ahead of the advancing Red Army.

Eventually settling in the quiet town of Annweiler in the Rheinland-Pfalz, she and her husband Walter (my grandfather) rebuilt their lives and raised the three children.  My grandfather was a businessman who owned and operated a metal fabrication plant in town -- water tanks, cookware, etc.  By the early 1960s the three daughters had grown up and started their lives.  The eldest (Gisela) married a local lawyer and settled in the nearby city of Mainz; the other two daughters (twins) moved on to new homes farther afield, my aunt (Renate) settling in Munich and my mother emigrating to the USA.

My mom met my dad and they started a family.  I was part of the first wave of children to hit the three German sisters, and more children soon followed.  In the picture to the right you see me in her arms (I'm about 3 months old) and that's my cousin Stefan, 3 years old and impossibly cute.  Every year or two we would pull up and travel over to Germany for some big family get-together, or would host a visit from some of them coming over to the US.  Germans get a lot of vacation time from work and so they're always traveling somewhere!

In 1980, we started a small "exchange program" within our extended family, where an American kid would head over to Germany for a year to live and go to school with the cousins, and conversely a German kid would come to the US for a year.  We toggled back and forth like this for something like 15 years.  For the 1980-1981 school year, I got to be the first one to do it, and so at the age of 14 I headed to Annweiler to live with Omi (a German term for grandmother similar to "Granny").  She was raising my cousin Stefan, a couple years older than me, so I attended his high school on the top of the hill on the edge of Annweiler.

So I spent the year in Annweiler with Omi and Stefan, exploring the town and utterly immersed in German culture.  I knew a tiny bit of German before I arrived, but once there I absorbed the language rapidly -- it is truly amazing how quickly a child brain can absorb language.  I was essentially fluent within months. Well, verbally fluent, where I could slur my way through the conjugations.  Masculine, feminine, neuter ...

Grandfather Walter ("Opa") had passed several years prior, so it was the three of us in the house (Omi, Stefan and me).  Already 60+ years old by then, Omi was a dynamo, running the household and keep us two boys in line.  Well, mostly me, I think Stefan could do no wrong.  She had some incredible gardens all around the house and a big cherry tree in the back that you could climb and gorge on (Julienne and Teresa have a great story about those cherries).  At night after dinner we'd entertain ourselves with a board game or just TV, and I remember a few thrilling evening outings with Stefan -- thrilling because he was a good 2-3 years older and so all his friends and activities were sooooo exciting for this awkward, dorky teen.

To the left is a picture of Omi with Julienne, my little sister, circa 1978.

After my year was up I returned to the US to start regular high school (having spent my freshman year overseas).  Entering as a sophomore was a little jarring, and ended up somewhat disrupting my curriculum (and grades).  So we all learned from that experience, and while my two younger sisters also eventually went to Germany for a year, they waited until finishing US high school and basically spent a "gap year" in Germany, a 13th year of high school.  Further, by then Stefan had completed his studies at the Annweiler school, and had moved on to college, so while my two sisters followed my example in going to Germany for a year, they did so in Mainz with my aunt's family and our cousins there.

So I was really the only one (of the US kids) to live with Omi and live in Annweiler.  She ran a tight ship (and didn't necessarily suffer uppity teenagers well) but also created a warm and loving household for us to grow up in.  And when it was time for family reunions, they were held in Annweiler.

Eventually she sold the Annweiler house (after some 50 years of residence) and moved to Mainz to be close to the family there.  As she aged she moved into assisted living but always with the extended family extremely close by and visiting frequently, if not daily!

We had a big family reunion in Mainz in 2008 and I got to see her one last time then (and Sharon got to meet her).  I also had a chance to get out to Annweiler and see the old house (now owned by someone else) and meet up with old family friends there.

In June the family will gather in Annweiler and we'll lay Omi to rest next to her husband.  I'll be proud to be there, representing the Monika / US branch of the family.

Rest in peace, Omi.