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Car Tech: Take a ride in the 2012 Ford Focus Electric

2012-04-17
lords about to do battle with the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt joining the ranks of mainstream car makers that have an Eevee but they're not gonna do it with a new model they're putting batteries and an electric motor in the existing focus let's drive it and check the tech we've got a separate video that looks at the underlying technology in this electric focus but in a nutshell it's got a 75 mile range about the same as a leaf like all Eevee is that will vary by terrain weather accessory use and your lead-footed 'no sting is the advanced charger Ford's installed that they say can do a full charge on the battery in three hours or so when plugged into a 240 volt or a level 2 charging station either in public or the one Ford is selling for about 1,500 bucks installed for your home that's about half the charging time for a Nissan Leaf or other similar EVs and can make for really useful top ups as well but none of that matters if it doesn't drive well ok I have not driven a Ford Focus Electric prior to this very moment so you're gonna get my unfiltered impressions and we're here in a downtown San Francisco location so I'm gonna start off giving you some urban stop-and-go impressions now Ford's thrown out the Nissan Leaf as the benchmark for this car and as you may recall I thought the Nissan Leaf drove like a very nice car a very mid class car nicer than you would think an econo box should the focus so far has a very similar bolted down feel to it we've gone over some crappy pavement here and it doesn't feel like any parts are falling off and so far that nasty gear line that I hate is not showing up anywhere either on acceleration deceleration or regen braking that's good this car does feel heavier just intuitively you can tell it's got a big ol belly a heavy batteries so yes it's gonna have a little more planted thing I feel a little bit of a spring in the ride but I can't tell if I don't do them head to head there are a couple of different gauges on this car you won't find in any other Ford there's one where you can add butterflies which is kind of like growing leaves and another Ford - we've seen it's a way of telling you you are neither accelerating too hard nor braking too hard gentle acceleration is as important as gentle breaking that's the way to drive a car if you want to really get the most mileage out of it any kind of car inside the cabin s4 dimensions they don't sell these things as stripped vehicles they've all got the high quality audio system the Sony branding right here you see this car has got the recycled water bottle interior that's where this fabrics made from you can also get a leather I would I would go for this stuff it's got a nice feel to it the other gauge I mentioned is this sort of a scoring thing that also really gets into the dynamics of accelerating and braking gently that's a new concept for most drivers and this is one of the few cars I've seen that has a display to coach you into doing that now I just turned on the HVAC system which wasn't gone before all those little things can take away from an electric vehicles range you've got to bear that in mind when you're running the heater in this car it's not powered by hot coolant off the engine because there isn't any you've got to run that with some battery power just about every subsystem does so in some I want to wait for a final production car to judge the driving quality and also how the battery holds a charge in my real-world use and then I'll want to see how the public warms to Annie V based on an existing model will they view that as comforting or just some sort of odd hack
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