Ford Won’t Jump Into PHEV Production

June 30, 2008

A senior manager at the Ford Motor Company confirmed that the company is not currently planning to develop a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle for the consumer market. Although the company is testing PHEVs in a joint project with Southern California Edison, Ford will wait to see if there is a real demand for PHEVs before committing its production facilities to a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
The strategy will provide more research and development dollars to put toward conventional hybrid designs. Currently, Ford offers just three hybrid models: the Escape, the Mercury Mariner and the Mazda Tribute. It also plans to bring the Fusion Hybrid and the Mercury Milan hybrid to market in 2009. GM and Toyota are actively developing plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Earlier this month, Mark Fields, Ford’s President of the Americas, called for government subsidies that would fund the development costs of PHEVs, and at the same time suggested that the US automakers would not compete effectively in the EV and PHEV markets without a domestic supplier for battery packs.
Most automakers have admitted that hydrogen propulsion is the long-term goal for their products, but hydrogen-powered vehicles won’t be cost-effective for the ordinary consumer without major changes in the world’s fueling infrastructure. Currently, hydrogen is expensive to produce and cannot be reliably and indefinitely stored in fuel tanks for more than a few days at a time.

Besides batteries and a receptacle, what did ford have to do in order to convert these ?

hybrid computer software update ?

Can I just buy the batteries from Johnson controls and convert my own ?

http://www.johnsoncontrols.com/publi...on__NiMH_.html

Re: Ford Escape- No PHEV Production plans
 

These simply aren't FEH's with bigger battery packs, they have significantly different programming, and even a completely different interface system.

You can't buy direct from JCI, and again, there's a lot more to it then just having bigger batteries.

The topic is also already being discussed, https://www.greenhybrid.com/discuss/...atement-18813/