Gadgetory

the badges say energy and that denotes a fusion hybrid with a much bigger battery it's a plug-in hybrid is it worth the cost though is it worth the cord let's drive this 2014 fusion energy titanium trim level and check the tech doesn't look a whole lot different than other fusions this is a titanium trim so it's a nice looking car spot one easily buy the big old badges they got planted all around it and of course dead giveaway here is the charge port door two and a half hours for a full charge on 220 now about seven or eight hours on a standard household outlet beyond that the dead giveaway is in the trunk much bigger battery on a plug-in much less trunk space as a result now every Fusion Energi is gonna have the my Ford touch LCD touchscreen interface it does not necessarily have Navis we're gonna find out later that's an ala carte option but it's not very expensive we've seen this before so I'm not going to dwell into it a couple of differences though when you're on the energy is you do have this energy screen it's going to show you in rather complex ways where the energy is flowing and what is taking parasitic loss off the electrical system you've also got a setting screen here that's unique to this car which is what they call my go it lets you set up some programming for how and when the car is gonna charge you can set this thing to charge when it's convenient to you or you can also set it to charge at the value time when the rates are ideal by the way this navigation systems also tuned up differently in the energy it's got the ability to run in an eco mode where it'll detect when you're going on a trip you've done before one that it knows and then it will run an electric only mode a little bit more if it can because it knows what's coming something the car can't do when it's a trip that it's not seen before and sort of going along with that is an eco cruise so when you're in cruise control which is either standard or adaptive the car will also change the way that it does its modulation on the road again to save energy to conserve electricity this vehicle does have automatic self Park Assist it's the basic version where you do all the pedals it handles the wheel now you know me I'm not real big on some of these touch sensitive panels to fiddly for driving this one is done well Ford's improved the touch response a lot past versions were a nightmare luckily volume remains an actual knob thank you for that as his power and disk eject but things like source and track forward and back are these little non moving touch sensitive deals you may like these you may not I find at least they don't have a lot of false responses anymore now aside from head unit electronics you've got the usual set of LCD displays on the sides of an analogue speedo the one that I think is most interesting is their brake coach and instantaneous fuel economy you can configure it a lot of ways but I want to see how I'm doing on instantaneous and then when I come to a stop I want to see if I recaptured as much energy as possible combined those are kind of a de facto momentum coach which is really key your drive controls in this car are pretty simple no paddles we have a CVT transmission which doesn't really reward those anyway a very basic PRN DL shift gate the L is more of a high regen position than it literally a low gear over here is your Evie button this will tell it run and Evie mode more than you naturally would most folks just gonna leave this an automatic though and then here is your Park Assist button to tell it start looking for a parking space using its sonar over to the right now under the hood of course is where some big differences happen between this standard fusion or even a Fusion Hybrid the Fusion Energi being a plug-in hybrid has just more battery to give it more ability to run electric only under here is a 2 liter atkinson cycle inline 4 it's a lean burn kind of an uninteresting inline 4 no turbos no direct injection it's just got a motor but that keeps the power going in combination with a seven-point six kilowatt hour battery pack to an electric motor this is the kind of thing that lets you run eb more than a standard hybrid in combination that means you can run this thing up to 21 miles on battery only under the right conditions which are fairly flexible it's not like a hybrid where it runs evenly a little burps and blips this guy's kind of an electric car part of the time now energies are only available in front-wheel drive other fusions can be had an all-wheel drive but not this guy good FYI for those of you that live in crappy weather the horsepower is the odd math of a hybrid that is 141 horse out of the engine 118 out of the electric motor that adds up to 195 total system power you don't just sum them together now zero to sixty happens in a fairly leisurely 8.6 seconds largely because of the vehicles weight over 3,900 pounds that is almost 500 pounds more than a two and a half liter gas engine fusion it all pays off of course in the efficiency 43 mpg 100 mpg II which reflects the fact that it can run in electric mode substantially ok so the energy has a good power but it doesn't come on in a terribly sprightly way as you may have noticed of all of our controls none of them go to sport they all go either neutral or into a more efficient manner so this is not a driver's car fusions can be fun to drive this is just pleasant to drive it's got a good comfortable ride you've got a lot of extra weight as I mentioned from the battery and the accessory equipment that makes it all work so this is a car that floats nicely down the road until you hit a big whoop in the pavement and then it really bottoms out that was a little disturbing let's talk about the driver assistance technology the one that's most notable is the lane departure I've got it set to active so I get two things when I drift off the lane it starts to pull me back with electric power steering doing its own thing but it also gives me kind of a a rotating stick shaker on the wheel I find the combination of those on the steering rack at once are kind of unnerving it's it works pretty well but it ends up putting me back in the lane kind of pointed too far the other way and I have to correct manually the forward collision technology works well I think it's well calibrated and when I've got it set to high I think it catches things early enough the car does not stop itself no matter what's going on it just pre charges the brakes and cranks up the boost so when you finally get on the stick and hit the brake pedal they really Jam on in my experience the energy is devoid of a lot of nasty electric car noises which is not the case with electrified car some of them make all these weird whining sounds this one doesn't on the other hand it's four-cylinder engine makes a bunch of kind of weird straining sounds especially given that it's got a CVT so it's looping up and down a lot not the most pleasant car to listen to but when the windows are up you don't really hear much ok pricing the fusion Energi may make you swallow hard because hang on there are incentives at the end when we start off at about 41 3 base for this guy delivered as I mentioned navigations Alucard extra 800 bucks driver assist 411 40s a good deal blind spot tech cross traffic alert active lane departure automatic high beams and wipers adaptive cruise / standard cruise is $1,000 and that includes the forward collision warning and brake boost technology the self-parking tex 900 bucks a moonroof is $1,000 rear inflatable seatbelts are interesting $200 that's a Ford thing all in road by 46 3 for a fusion but then come a mountain of incentives first of all Ford shaves $4,000 off the top because they're competing with the Chevy Volt which recently had a price haircut if you're in California where I am is a $1,500 tax credit and federal will give you a 37 50 tax credit notice that's exactly half of what you get for a full electric car but the bottom line the real bottom line is is it worth getting the energy the plug-in hybrid or street just get a standard fusion with a gas engine which is real efficient so I've done the math up here let's say you take a Fusion EcoBoost two and a half liter front-wheel drive with a same trim level compare it to this energy you see that you've got after all the incentives a fairly close price all in that's because we got a lot of money on the hood of this car if you take it further it's an 833 dollar additional cost for the energy work that out across the annual fuel cost savings which is about 900 dollars a year on this car according to those federal ballpark calculations and you're looking at a payoff of just 11 months thanks to all the incentives though if those weren't in place you got a big difference in your payoff you go from 11 months to 11 years so with the current incentives in place and if you've got a state incentive like we have here in California as well this guy's kind of a no-brainer if you're all about efficiency and if you've got a shortest commute let's say 15 miles or so each way and a plug at work it becomes even more of a slam-dunk