An early look at Ford's Fusion Hybrid

People often ask whether American car companies can make competitive hybrids and cars that get really good mileage. The public's assumption seems to be that they can't.

The Ford Fusion Hybrid is here (arriving in dealerships now) to prove they can. While we'll have to wait for a full test to see how it fares against competitors such as the Toyota Camry Hybrid, several of us have had a chance to drive Fusion Hybrids and have been fairly impressed.

The EPA estimates that the Fusion Hybrid, with its 2.5-liter, four-cylinder engine, can get 41 mpg in the city and 36 on the highway. My colleague, Gabe Shenhar, put 200 miles over the weekend with a borrowed one and got 37 mpg without even trying. While that's not as good as a Toyota Prius (44 mpg overall), the Fusion is a bigger car and handles more nimbly. The next-closest high-mpg hybrid on the market, the Camry, got 34 mpg overall in our tests.

Praveen Cherian, hybrid program leader at Ford, says the company worked on a lot of little details to get that kind of fuel economy. For example, the car we drove had dual-zone climate control. If the passenger set the temperature to much less than the driver, the air conditioner would have to work to keep the temperature at the cooler setting (then provide extra heat to the driver.) In the Fusion Hybrid, the system knows if the passenger gets out of the car and changes the setting to match the driver's setting, he says. The company also uses regenerative braking more aggressively than competing models, which is helped by a brake-by-wire system. It also seems that the Fusion is able to sustain long stretches of electric-only motoring. For example, it can loaf around at 40 mpg on a country road with a very light throttle.

The Fusion Hybrid is also impressively quiet, especially considering its four-cylinder power plant. That's key, because if there's one thing that makes a car feel underpowered, it's a noisy engine that sounds overworked. And the Fusion Hybrid doesn't feel underpowered.

The most interesting thing about it though, may be its instrument cluster. I, for one, have never seen electronic leafy vines "growing" in my gauge cluster before. In addition to battery charge, amount of electric assist (or regeneration), a tachometer, instantaneous fuel economy and other electronic gauges, a vine on the right side of the display grows leaves (or they fade away) every three minutes, depending on the average fuel efficiency. The higher the fuel economy, the more leaves the plant grows. At first, driving as I normally do, the plant had only one leaf. Within a block or two of starting to drive gently to maximize fuel efficiency, the plant grew about five leaves. In addition, there's a bar that moves within the EV zone and allows you to monitor your right foot in a way that maximizes the available electric power.

Nancy Gioia, Ford's director of sustainable mobility technology and hybrid vehicles, says the additional driver interaction helps to boost fuel economy by 3 to 15 percent in the company's studies.

After all, nobody likes to kill their houseplants--even if they're in the car.

--Eric Evarts