Ford Fusion Hybrid Due March 2009!

If you read the GCC article mentioned by a poster above, it says "The compression ration in the engine is 12.3:1". Well, with this high of a compression, it would seem the Fusion will require premium gas. That would be a deal-killer for a lot of people.

 

I have to take issue with your/their units. The unit of energy commonly used is the kilowatt hour, not kilowatts per hour. It's simply the power supplied multiplied by the amount of time the power is supplied for. (The SI unit of energy is the joule, symbol J, which is one watt supplied for one second, so you get very large numbers very quickly).

To work out runtime, you divide the energy rating by the amount of power needed, which should be marked on the device. An electric kettle might well be a 1.3kW heater, so you could run that for one hour if you were running it continuously. The coffee-maker review you linked to stated 0.12 kWh used to brew a pot, so I make that 10 pots for the Fusion battery, if the figure is accurate.

Battery life depends largely on the load placed on the battery - on the amount of current drawn - and so ratings are nominal. Still, I would expect that the rating for a car hybrid battery is appropriate for the vehicle it's installed in!

For comparison, the Prius battery is given as 65Ah at 201.6V nominal = 1,310 Wh, approximately the same as the Fusion hybrid.

 

It may be that the journalist, or the spokesman he was talking to, or the marketers that produced the fact sheet, did not understand the figure if it's a variable-compression, or unequal compression-expansion, design. The article states that it's a variable timing design, although only on the intake valve.[1]

The 2008 Toyota Prius brochure I have (UK market) quotes the Prius engine as having a 13.0 compression ratio. That's the very simplistic ratio of the volume with the piston at bottom-dead-centre versus top-dead-centre. The practical compression ratio is far lower as the fuel intake valve doesn't close until part-way through the compression stroke (some of the fuel/air mixture taken in is pushed back out).

By the same token, the quoted engine displacement - 1497cc, rounded up to 1.5 litres - is accurate (being the cross-section area of the bore, multiplied by the stroke, multiplied by four cylinders), but not terribly revealing.

[1] Ford rant: Come on, Ford, Toyota have had intake variable timing for close to two decades (Wikipedia says 1991)! Ford were offering a 1.6 Ti-VCT (Twin Independent Variable Camshaft Timing) engine on the 2005 Ford Focus, in place of a 1.8 litre, developing 15 horsepower more than the standard 1.6 (115 vs 100bhp), while having slightly lower emissions on the combined cycle.

It's still on the model lists, but not specifically mentioned, and they've added a 1.8 litre (non-variable timing) for all of 10bhp more, giving 0.5s better 0-60 time (10.3 seconds vs 10.8) while consuming nearly 10% more fuel in the urban part of the test, and nearly 4% more in the extra-urban part. The engine looks like it's still a less-bored-out 2.0 with the cast-iron engine block, for it weighs 70kg more than the 1.6. The Prius brochure states that the hybrid battery weighs only 39kg.

Is it any wonder I chose a Prius over another Focus?

 

No. Why do you ask?

 

More expensive & almost as efficient as my Prius, not to mention it is made in that Land of Precision Engineering, Mexico. Ford, if you're lucky you've got 2nd place but I don't believe you'll hold it long. The next gen Prius & Insight should push the Focus to 3rd. At least someone in Detroit is actually trying.

 

Phew! Thanks for saving me from going into pedant mode. The OP seemed to be quoting the TFA, a typical journalist innumeracy, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

 

I'm pretty much market challenged, but I thought the Fusion was a Camry competitor and is therefore a step up in price/performance.