The New Ford Hybrid

As hybrid cars become more and more popular with the general population searching for an alternative to the traditional combustion engine – it was only a matter of time before car giant Ford got in on the act. With one of their main competitors, Toyota, currently selling around one million hybrid cars a year, the market is a tempting one.

However, Ford has not just been satisfied to copy Toyota and other manufacturers of hybrid cars. No they’ve decided to go one better and design a hybrid engine that is even more efficient than any car ever released to the market. While they may have taken the concept inspiration from the best-selling Toyota Prius, the engineering is all their own.

Ford took an existing engine from one of their combustion models, the four cylinder Ford Escape, and modified it into a hybrid. Hybrid cars have two ways of producing power; an electric motor and a traditional combustion engine. The combustion engine is the source of most of the power, and is still indispensable from a practical point of view. These engines are powered by gas or diesel and this can be bought from just about any service station on Earth, whereas the power for the electric motor needs to be topped up after it has powered about eight miles’ worth of driving.

The difference with Ford’s model, the F-150, is that instead of storing the power produced in a battery the F-150 stores it in hydraulic cylinders. The massive increase in energy efficiency means that the new car is a massive three times more energy efficient than Toyota’s Prius.

Despite being almost half as big again than the Prius (at 4800 lbs curb weight it is 65% heavier than the Toyota), the F-150 manages to match it in terms of fuel efficiency with an immense 60mpg for city driving. As a comparison, that is four hundred percent more miles per gallon than the gas-only version, which saves you money at the pump and saves a lot of damage to the environment.

The Hydraulic Hybrid system that Ford are using for the F-150 is not particularly applicable for smaller vehicles – the size of a hydraulic cylinder makes fitting them on a smaller vehicle quite the challenge – but when it gives fuel efficiency like this, it is a pretty persuasive argument for buying a large vehicle. Normally reputable for getting through quite a bit of the planets non-renewables, this size of vehicle is now showing that its size has applications beneficial to the environment, which will persuade a lot of people to give them a go.

Where Toyota led, Ford have followed and raised the stakes. It is now in the hands of other car manufacturers to see where they can take it next, and with the game having seen a significant step up it will be fascinating to see where it goes. What we cannot dispute is that a gauntlet has been thrown down, and you know what car manufacturers are like – they can not resist a challenge, so let’s see how they respond.