My guess is that Ford saw the Estima Hybrid minivan release in Japan, did some quick math and figured out that the 2008 HiHy will have 250+ horsepower and get 42 MPG (purely guesses here). Maybe they figured back away instead of getting trampled.

[/RANT]

Either way, there's also the question of whether or not Ford will make 250,000 vehicles total in 2010 .

At the current rate of implosion, will there be a US auto industry at all in 2010? I keep seeing the flops and misjudgements and thinking "oh, well now they will have learned something" but nope. They seem so committed to standing by their past mistakes that they would rather make more than admit they were wrong.

I find it frustrating to look at the potential the domestics had, including the tax dollars and willing test subjects for innovations. They still blew it. Now look how many people are suffering because of it.

Oh well. Think of how much cleaner the air will be when every car says Toyota or Honda on it.

[/rant]

I digress. As TomDavie said, at least they are being honest about the change of plans, though their claimed reasoning behind it smells funny to me.

 

Assuming what Ash-dude says is true, he hit the nail on the head. It is all about cheating the CAFE.

I'm totally disgusted with American auto makers looking for work arounds and loopholes while the Japaneese are ahead of the curve.

 

E10, E85, whatever...yer still burning something. Heck, I'm surprised Detroit hasn't tried to pitch how cheap it would be to run a car on coal. At some point, people need to take responsibility for what's coming out of the car rather than what it costs going into the car. E85 is a one sided 'feel-good' solution that only solves foreign dependence. Ironically, the longer Detroit waits, the more dependent we will be on the Japanese for more fuel efficient cars.

 

How you plan on making a car go without burning anything?

 

Football fans - Mr. Ford just extended the contract for Matt Millen, argueably the worst General Manager in the NFL. Mismanaging the Detroit Lions is one thing - Ford Motor Co. is another....don't you wish Robert Kraft was the owner?....that would be patriotic if he did.

 

This is where I think E85 is going to be a huge bust. The July C/D had a decent E85 article. MPG hit was was right around 30%, and no real confidence it will cost any lower than gas. Not a lot of incentive to buy one.

You're right on with the CAFE. C/D did covered this in the article too. To paraphrase: Federal law requires that automakers offer for sale vehicles with an average of 27.5 mpg - trucks 22.2 mpg. Failure results in fines. Now the loophole - for the purpose of this calculation, CAFE only considers the 15% gas content of E85 for the purpose of MPG calculation like you said. By this measure, a Tahoe goes from 20.1 mpg to 33.3 mpg. So by offering these land-barges with E85 as an option, they get to raise the fleet mpg. Now they cap mpg benefit from these cars, but according to this article, it's enough for GM to avoid $200M in fines - I would assume Ford too.

I guess their better at gaming the system that doing honest engineering.

 

If Ford had said they were gonna build ethanol-only vehicles, it would've been fine. (Not personally what I'd like to see, but it would've shown a commitment.) From what I understand, they can raise the compression ratio and get good-as-gas power from E85/E100, but then the cars can't burn gas.

By saying they're gonna build flex-fuel vehicles, Ford is just punting responsibility. "Oh? What's that? Ethanol's not available? People aren't using it? Well, we did our part, we built cars that can run on it." When Ethanol fails to achieve enough market penetration (can anyone think of an industry that might not want that to happen? An industry with powerful lobbyists, perhaps?), nothing will have been accomplished.

 

[QUOTE=bwilson4web]Someone asked me the other day if E85 made hybrids redundant. I pointed out that my hybrid will need less than half the acerage to run compared to a non-hybrid. "Do you want to run on 100 acers of corn or 30?"QUOTE]

You hit the nail on the head! With the production of ethanol lagging behind the demand for summer blend fuel, the cost per gallon has spiked. What will it be like when Detroit begins manufacturing tens of thousands of E85 vehicles? The price will rise even further. How much acreage will we need to turn over to the production of fuel instead of food? How much petroleum based fertilizer will need to be used to keep up? In the end, efficiency is going to be required, no matter what fuel is being burned.

 

Pedals?

 

BEVs charged from solar arrays...or wind.

http://www.darelldd.com/ev/

Cheers,

Curt.