Gadgetory

let's do this this is Shawn Hollister with birch and I'm here with Brian Bishop my colleague at the verge and we are here in a Ford Focus Electric taking it for a test drive I can actually hear the sound of the birds outside almost louder in the sound of the engine so here we're going to take a look at the Ford Focus Electric regenerative braking feature board actually has a built in reward system here in the upper left hand corner of the navigation app it's called energy coach you take a look at that it'll give you up-to-date stats about your braking acceleration and boozing habits here adding a little bit to that meter and giving you a score to see how much energy you've recaptured at each stop you can see there Brian managed 98% bad so Brian tell me a bit about what this is uh what this is like to drive your overall impressions you know it's uh the car feels very very tight and it's control and it's very nice and quiet which is not the case with some of the earlier four focuses that had been out of the market I on one that was actually extremely loud so this is quite nice and the the subpoenas and acceleration are very very enjoyable it's just a very nice car to drive especially in a situation like this where it's you know you have lots of quit stops you have odd terms angles on hills lots of pedestrians it's a it's a nice experience so how do you feel about the range it's a good question for told us that the vehicle has 76 miles on a full charge which kind of calls it a question who the ideal customer for this vehicle is you think you know with the media charging stations a suburban environment we can have one in your house makes the most sense but if you have a car in that situation you're probably gonna have need to go more than 80 miles at a given time in a city environment like this it makes a lot of sense because you have any Oh quick short trips that kind of thing once again you're not going to have a charging station at your apartment so right now it's it's in a kind of a weird middle ground and maybe a case we need to go and have more technological developments provide faster charging that's more widespread to really take advantage of