Of all the cars Ford has released recently, the one that has gotten the most “green” coverage is the Fusion Hybrid. It’s a good looking car and most people I know who’ve driven it have come back and told me that they were impressed—including even a couple die-hard “anti-greenies.” Yet, for some inexplicable reason I’d actually been resistant to test drive it even when presented with an opportunity. Maybe all that leftover resentment hanging around from my past experiences was having more of an effect than I thought?
Whatever the reasons, it turns out I was being an idiot to resist this car. Seriously.
So when one of my favorite bands announced they were holding a 3 day music festival in Indio, California—Phish Festival 8—my mind subconsciously put 2 and 2 together, subsequently let me in on its little secret, and thus was born the idea to conduct a test drive of the Fusion Hybrid from the airport at Long Beach to the festival and back with fellow blogger and Phish Head, Tim Hurst. It would be a several day trip over 300 miles and it seemed like the perfect way to get to know this car as if we really owned it.
I want to get this one point out there right off the bat: even though Ford provided us with the test car, everything you read in this review is in no way influenced by any relationship with Ford. During the test drive I tried to remain as objective as possible.
Fuel Economy
The EPA rates the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid as getting 41 MPG in the city and 36 MPG on the highway. But more and more those EPA numbers are meaningless with modern alterna-cars such as hybrids and PHEVs. They can be incredibly sensitive to how you drive them and your mileage will vary dramatically based on your willpower to save fuel.
Case in point: even the EPA now gives expected ranges in very small print underneath its bold, one-number MPG proclamations which show large swings. For the 2010 Fusion Hybrid the EPA small print says the expected city range for most drivers is 35 to 47 MPG and for highway driving it is 31 to 41 MPG. I don’t know about you, but to me a variance of 12 MPG is pretty large range to be able to boldly say that the car gets 41 MPG in the city.
Based on about 60 miles of city driving, my experience was that if you tried you could get nearly 50 MPG in the city—and it really didn’t take that much effort, willpower or training to do it. The car provides you with such a great driver interface—the Ford SmartGauge—that it almost seems like fun trying to make it get the highest fuel efficiency possible.
The Fusion Hybrid’s killer app is the ability to act like a fully electric car below speeds of 47 mph. With a little coaching from the SmartGauge, you can easily bring the car down to the level at which the 2.5L Atkinson-Cycle I-4 Hybrid engine shuts off and it runs completely off of its high-power NiMH battery. Doing some additional planning ahead for stop lights, I found that on the relatively flat drive between Huntington Beach and Long Beach Airport I was able to average about 49 MPG.
In the city, the car benefits from getting up to speed quickly with its available 191 HP and then feathering back from the throttle to pop it into EV mode. Using this strategy I could make it from stoplight to stoplight with about 70% of my time as an electric car. I also found that the transition between engine driving and EV mode was essentially seamless, with the stop/start feature being barely noticeable.
If you spend most of your time driving in the city and you’re willing to drive a bit less aggressively with your mind focused on both the road and the SmartGauge, you will get much better than the EPA average of 41 MPG.
When we finally hit the road to make the long drive out to Festival 8, I was curious to see if we could beat the EPA estimate of 36 MPG on the highway. Although I didn’t make highway-only estimates, in the end we were able to average almost 39 MPG for the entire 328 mile trip. Given that we ran into heavy traffic, used the A/C a lot and were charging all sorts of mobile devices that’s a pretty respectable showing, but clearly the Fusion Hybrid is built to excel in city driving.
One item of note: the cruise control on the Fusion Hybrid helps to conserve fuel by not killing it to get up slopes and letting the car go above the set speed on downhills. I also noticed that on extended downhills, the engine would shut off conserving fuel even more. In fact, the cruise control on this car is so unlike your standard cruise control that Ford has decided to call it speed control. Usually you have to avoid cruise control to get the best fuel economy, but the speed control on the Fusion Hybrid turned out to deliver better mileage on the highway than I could even when I was concentrating.
Comfort and Convenience
Ford provided us with a fully-loaded production model 2010 Fusion Hybrid, so it was certainly more decked out than what you might purchase on your own. With a base price of $27,625 plus a destination charge of $725, it is not a cheap car by any means.
Our model, with the highest level option package available (Rapid Spec 502A), came to around $32,000. Above and beyond the long list of standard features, this package included an upgraded Sony sound system, a moon/sunroof, a voice activated navigation system with a Sirius-linked traffic and travel guide, leather-trimmed heated front seats, a blind spot warning system, and a back-up camera.
On our long drive, the 8-way adjustable driver’s seat proved to be very useful and the Sirius radio was great, but the Microsoft SYNC system left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Trying to get it to connect up with my iPhone turned out to be one of the biggest frustrations I had with the car. The bluetooth worked fine for making phone calls, but when I wanted to either stream my music over bluetooth or even connect the iPhone up through the USB port to play my music through the SYNC system, it had so many problems I eventually gave up.
Actually, I take that back. The whole system worked flawlessly for about 30 minutes, after which it all went to hell and all the connections I had set up with my iPhone suddenly stopped working. Leave it to Microsoft to screw this up. I’m not some kind of technologically ignorant idiot either. Give me a few minutes and I can usually figure something like this out without any problems. I rarely have to use directions, but after many trips to the SYNC manual, I still couldn’t figure it out.
Even with the navigation system there were problems. It simply took too many steps to make it do what I wanted it to. Compared to the interface design that went into my iPhone, the SYNC system needs help. It was even more of a conundrum to me because the SmartGauge—which is separate from the SYNC system—is designed so well. Why didn’t they just have the SmartGauge team design the SYNC system instead of Microsoft? It likely would have turned out better.
Because of all the extra space taken up with the Hybrid machinery, the Fusion Hybrid has an incredibly small trunk. It’s definitely big enough to hold about 2 golf bags, but more than that and you’ll be puzzling it out to try and make it all fit.
One unexpected benefit of the high power battery and stop-start system: when you’re parked at a concert venue or tailgating you can turn on the car completely and it won’t use any fuel until the battery drains to a certain point and then the engine will turn on just long enough to charge the battery and then shut off again. At Festival 8 this was a great feature because we had so many things to charge. I’ve been struck lame more than once by dead battery syndrome at a multi-day concert. The Fusion Hybrid essentially eliminates that problem, and it didn’t have that much of an effect on overall fuel economy.
Safety and Build Quality
The optional installed blind spot warning system seems like a great idea gone horribly wrong. If I could have turned the thing off I would have. In parking lots it got confused and beeped at me like there was no tomorrow. When we pulled off the road and were surrounded by bushes you would have thought the world was coming to an end with the amount of incessant beeping this thing produced. Needless to say, it’s an option that has a long way to come.
The back up camera, on the other hand, was great. The clarity with which you can see objects behind you is outstanding. It took a while to get used to the idea of looking at a display rather than the rear view mirror, but once you convince your brain that it is okay you quickly become accustomed to it. In fact, now that I’m driving my own car again I kind of miss the back-up camera.
The Fusion Hybrid felt very solid. Around corners and in traffic I certainly felt confident in the car. I didn’t hear a single squeak or rattle the entire time we were driving it. You can tell a lot about how well a car was designed by the details: all of the seams were well stitched and the interior and exterior molding joints had very close tolerances.
One minor issue: when you come to a stop the engine shuts off, and it is usually unnoticeable when the engine comes back on after pressing the accelerator pedal. But if you have to accelerate very quickly (such as when making a turn across heavy traffic into a parking lot) the slight delay is enough to scare you when you cut across the oncoming traffic. Just be prepared for this and don’t expect completely instantaneous acceleration.
Overall Impressions
Even with its minor foibles, after having 5 days to get to know it I left southern California loving this car. The 2010 Fusion Hybrid has great looks, is fun to drive, sports a bunch of features that add value in unexpected ways, is comfortable and, above all else, proves that Ford cares about what it’s selling again.
Certainly at a base price of $23,150 you can buy a bare bones 2010 Prius with virtually no options for much less, but Ford has made the calculation that they aren’t willing to sell the Fusion Hybrid as a bare bones model. If you really want to start comparing apples to apples, the Fusion Hybrid and the Toyota Prius are very competitively priced with one another when equipped similarly.
The Prius does score higher EPA fuel economy numbers, but it has less versatility and ability to drive it like you want to. Based on my experience, you can get much higher fuel economy in the Fusion Hybrid than the EPA suggests. Plus the Ford SmartGauge beats the Prius’ interface’s pants off—there is no comparison in that department. Toyota has a lot to learn about human-machine interface, and now that they actually have some competition in the hybrid realm I hope it spurs them to figure it out.
And, let’s face it, the Fusion is a much better looking car.
When I was leaving the concert grounds after the first night of Festival 8, I was in a dense crowd of fellow Phish fans and I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation behind me. It was a rather fitting and prophetic conversation because in it, a man was half-joking with a woman about how he lost all his money in the stock market. The woman replied that she was doing okay because the market was coming back, and then she said this: “I’ve invested my money in Ford because they’re the only American company worth anything anymore.”
If that’s the conventional wisdom at a rock concert from a random conversation overheard in a gigantic crowd, then Ford is set for a major comeback. Certainly the recent news that Ford posted an unexpected nearly $1 billion profit and that their sales are up dramatically is pointing in that direction.
And if they keep pumping out cars like the Fusion Hybrid, the sky’s the limit.
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