![]() The gas engine is the base Escape's 2.3-liter four, which has been modified to run on the Atkinson cycle. This first Ford hybrid follows the technology path of the Toyota Prius by combining an efficient gasoline engine with not one but two electric motors. The Escape now joins a burgeoning array of hybrids from Toyota and Honda. Whatever the reason, the baby is a year overdue but has finally arrived. That fact may have people wondering why it's taken Ford five years and 100 engineers to successfully install a hybrid drivetrain in an existing vehicle, the Escape SUV. customers must endure waits of eight months.Īlthough it can't deliver the 50-or-so mpg of the hybrid econocars, 25 mpg may sound good to buyers who just have to have an SUV.īy industry standards, it takes an American automaker about three years to turn out a new car. This may become a problem, since Toyota has been struggling to meet Prius demand for the same reason, and even though the company recently upped global production by 50 percent to 15,000 a month, U.S. That's about 12 percent of all Escapes, and some environmental groups argue it is not enough to compensate for Ford's less-than-average CAFE performance.įord says it would build more than the 20,000 hybrids promised, but that is currently the maximum amount of batteries the supplier can produce. Stopping our hybrid Escape from 70 mph took an unimpressive 195 feet, 26 feet longer than the last V-6 Escape we tested.įord hopes to sell 20,000 2005 Escape hybrids. All this computer-controlled wizardry wouldn't be apparent to the driver, but we noted that the amount of pedal travel seems less than normal, and it has a sort of fake feel to it, more like a video-game input. When the driver pushes the brake pedal, the brake-by-wire system divvies up how much stopping power is provided by recapturing energy through the electric motor and at what point the four-wheel discs should step in to help. Once moving above parking-lot speeds, we noticed the hybrid Escape's performance felt much more V-6-like, providing acceptable passing capability and executing the 30-to-50-mph and 50-to-70-mph passing tests in 4.6 and 7.2 seconds, 0.7 and 2.0 seconds slower than the V-6. Also, the 3839-pound hybrid was nearly 350 pounds heavier than the last four-wheel-drive V-6 Escape we tested. This constraint means that at low vehicle speeds the electric motor can't spin fast enough to bring the gas engine to its 6000-rpm power peak and, in fact, the gas engine can't reach its power peak until about 75 mph. ![]() Another hindrance is that the planetary CVT's available gear ratios are dictated by a combination of vehicle speed and the electric motors' maximum speeds. Since all the braking and acceleration is by wire, the pedals are nothing more than a request to the computer, and the computer frowns on brake-torquing. Much of this sluggish straight-line performance comes because there really isn't any way to launch this Escape aggressively. The last V-6 Escape we tested completed the same tasks in 8.5 and 16.3 seconds, respectively. But if you don't mind compromising your greenie status, you can switch the climate-control dial to "Max A/C" or a defrost setting, and it will stay on.Įlectric-assisted steering allows the wheel to work even when the gas engine is shut off, and the driver will notice the steering has ample weight to it, although it doesn't provide much feedback-adequate for around-town putzing but not so good when exploring the Continentals' 0.73-g limit.įord says the Escape hybrid offers acceleration performance similar to the V-6 Escape model's, but we came up about two seconds slower across the board, from a rather listless 10.8-second 0-to-60 saunter to an 18.2-second quarter-mile time. ![]() On a hot day, you'll notice that the air conditioning shuts off in the hybrid when the engine does, because it's driven by a belt off the engine.
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