Ford Or Fetish? | Green Energy News

November 28, 2004 – Vol.9 No.36

FORD OR FETISH?

Ford has announced it will increase production of its Escape Hybrid to 20,000 units for 2005 and will begin selling it nationwide. The company had been selling the SUV only in California, Michigan and the Northeastern U.S. states. For November the company announced it had sold 894, 2 and 4 wheel drive Escape Hybrids - not bad.

The base price for the two-wheel drive model is about $27,000.

The hybrid will run around town, or creep in traffic on pure, battery electric power up to about 25 miles per hour. Above that the 4-cylinder engine kicks in.

The Escape Hybrid won’t give you total independence from gasoline. But if you’re willing to spend more than 22 times that of the Escape gas/electric - and live in California - you can buy a very nice, very stylish, high-performance battery-electric vehicle - the Fetish from Venturi of Monaco.

For more than $600,000 Venturi will build you a two-seat, carbon fiber and aluminum, electric sports car that has a top speed of 105 mph (170 kph) and can accelerate 0-60 mph (0-100 kph) in 4.5 seconds. It’s as quick or quicker than a new Corvette. All this performance is due to its 180-kilowatt motor (300-horsepower) electric drive motor.

Recharge for the lithium ion battery pack is as little as 3.5 hours after driving 155-220 miles (250-350 kilometers) The car is about the size of a Mazda Miata and weighs about the same, about 2400 pounds (1100 kg) including the battery pack.

Is Fetish a little pricey for a car the size of Miata? A tad too much for a daily commute?

Sure. It’s a car for the environmentally-conscious ultra-rich.

However, consider this. Its high cost is due, in part, to its very limited production - hand-built-to-order. Venturi, too, of course, wants to earn a profit while it also recoups the money spent on development. But if a car like this were produced in the tens of thousands, instead of a few dozen the company might build, price per unit would drop precipitously.

From a performance standpoint - even range between refueling (recharging in this case) - the car far exceeds any of the fuel cell cars now available only to qualified/selected buyers. And the fueling infrastructure for this vehicle is, for most part, in place - the power grid.

Can’t people get used to waiting 3.5 hours of time to refuel - less than the time between breakfast and lunch - for a vehicle with no emissions and reenergized from any source of power - nuclear, dirty coal or preferably clean renewable power from the grid? This vehicle technology could be available to the masses in a few years instead of a decade or more as predicted for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Visit Venturi at http://www.venturi.fr/ and Ford at http://www.ford.com/ .