100,000 Ford Hybrids: Getting Ready for the Fusion and Milan

(MoneyWatch)  Automakers used to celebrate when they produced a million of some popular model, like the Chevy Impala or Ford Galaxie. But these are leaner times, and besides, the green space is not that big yet. So Ford is celebrating another, smaller, milestone: 100,000 hybrids.

"It's huge," says Gil Portalatin, Ford's hybrid systems engineering manager. "This was from a domestic supplier, not one of our foreign competitors. We were the first American company to get into the hybrid business. Now we've built 100,000 of them, and we're doing well." That's relatively speaking, of course. Ford is, after all, the only one of the Big Three not to seek federal bailout money.

The 100,000th hybrid, built on a Kansas City plant that also assembles Ford F-150 trucks and the Mazda Tribute, was a Ford Escape. Portalatin says the Escape accounts for more than 90 percent of production, and the Mercury Mariner version, not markedly different, is a distinct also-ran.

The future of Ford's Lincoln and Mercury divisions has long been debated, but the automaker seems to be keeping them for now.

One bright spot for the Escape is its use as a taxi. There are an estimated 2,000 of them on the streets of New York alone, and Portalatin notes that the taxi companies went ahead and bought them from dealerships without getting discounts through fleet sales. Some have now amassed 200,000 miles or more (and usually on the first set of batteries).

The Escape/Mariner gets 34 mpg in the city, 31 on the highway. The forthcoming Fusion/Milan hybrid sedans, which will be on the road in a couple of months, do better, with 41 in the city and 36 on the highway. Ford is projecting sales of 24,000 in the first calendar year, Portalatin said.

Both the Escape and the Fusion hybrids are California-designated partial-zero emission vehicles (PZEVs), which means that they're much cleaner out of the tailpipe than their non-hybrid versions (and most other cars on the road, too).

Ford is not expected to make the Fusion's PZEV status a big part of its marketing campaign, however. "I'm sure a lot of people don't know what it means," Portalatin said. "At this point, we make note of it in advertising. But for most customers I'm not sure it's a selling point. We want to be environmental leaders, and making our hybrids PZEV-compliant is one way of making a statement."

The Fusion's "smart gauge" helps maximize mileage:



Photo: Sam VarnHagen/Ford Motor Co.