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Ford Focus Electric 1st Look - Inside the Future

2011-12-15
Mike Pearlman here for technobuffalo I'm inside a Ford Focus Electric with Chad Darcy chad is thee on the Focus Electric marketing manager tell me about the lithium-ion battery the lithium-ion batteries that next generation of battery and so what it allows us to do is it's less weight right it takes up less space because of that way you can kind of shrink better a little bit but one of the big things is you can continue to plug it in nightly and you don't see that range degradation that you would on an older style batteries okay how about a kilowatt hours the battery is 23 kilowatt hours okay for total capacity and charging time what is it three to four hours act on a low to charging system like the one we have out there the Levittown branded one it's three to four hours and we have a 6.6 kilowatt onboard charger that allows us to do that that's about half a time of our closest competition very cool and then that battery allows this card to go 80 up to 80 miles an hour and a little over 80 miles an hour it is a little over 80 miles an hour okay and you get a hundred percent torque at zero miles and hours you get that instant as soon as I gers pounds right out of the stoplight correct one of the things that we really like about this vehicle is the fact that we did build this off the base focus platform so the driving dynamics of this car are unlike other electric vehicles out there is a very highly tuned vehicle and do you have rejected regenerative braking as you do in the c-max and the heat dissipation course okay we over the years we've been able to refine it to the point that you can capture on the Focus Electric and capture up to ninety five percent of that kinetic energy that you would have lost in a non regenerative braking vehicle wow that is a lot yes it's great and all that does it just helps you give arranged because that goes back into the battery isn't and this car is even greener it takes it a step further and we'll talk about the recycled material in the interior yes so there's a lot of recycled material in the interior now this one happens to have leather but on our cloth seating fabric that is made of 100-percent post-industrial and post-consumer content made by a company called unify and their brand of fabric is reprieve in addition to that fabric we have on a standard in all focus and focus electric the seats are made out of soy cushion foam we've got recycled denim in there we noticed when folks were buying electric potluck five vehicles that they were going for the high trim series and the higher options so in a Focus Electric we came out with one trim level and we put everything into there we could in fact the only option on this vehicle is leather seating so it's not just the seeds it's not just the faculty lucky people we've done a lot to make the car green inside and out in fact the water bottles that we are using today at this press event are actually going to be used for a future ford focus electric interior and that's pretty cool tell me about the charging station and the merge with best buy on that we have partnered with best buy inner geek geek squad to help introduce the charging station installation process to the customer and the reason we wanted to do that is people trust the brand name of best buy and geek squad the the average price for an installation is going to be 1499 and that's leadership in terms of its class of all-electric vehicles 1000 499 1499 Ford Focus Electric with the Eco material interior price after the tax incentive 32 for 95 in this vehicle as I mentioned earlier it has one trim level and we highly content this vehicle so comes with everything from premium so many audio to the my for mobile phone and web site application myford touch sink the activate voice control features it's got rain sensing wipers so it's got everything on the vehicle that you could want Smackdown Ford Focus Electric versus the Nissan Leaf how do we know that question was coming well one of our big key features right now is the fact that we can charge in half the time and so you think about what takes for an average consumer in their daily lifestyle and how much further they can go that's a very big point in the course do we think about the premium audio that we have in there in the premium electronics that we have miles per gallon equivalent versus the leaf we are the first five passenger vehicle to achieve 100 or better MPG and so that's definitely a story for Ford Focus Electric as well as you have a solar program where you can have a solar panel installed in your house so the Sun power program which we term drab green for life is actually a vehicle offset so it will feed power through solar panels into your input at the house or into the grid age that you have done to and it's there to provide the offset for what you use in before focusing on easier very so it doesn't directly feed the vehicle but it offsets that energy that you're using ok and the last thing is you have a an application phone application for Android and iOS yep and blackberries okay I'm blackberries and this basically allows you to charge remotely so you can do some of that get through the application not only that you can find your vehicle through the application through a GPS tracking and you can find charging station correct you could check all your stats and compare how you're breaking and you have a break there's a breaking score yeah it tells you how well you do with your regenerative braking we want the consumers to feel that they're very involved with the vehicle at eisenmann is if you makes me feel connected so I mean you you can have your breaking stories you also just shows you how much money you save for gas how much carbon dioxide emissions you say you can share all of your results through social media on various places including Twitter and Facebook so we've put a lot of thought into you can rub it into your friends bases and I got better miles per gallon equivalent in you my breaking scores better than you Chad thanks so much thank you very much all right I
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