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 :)
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