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| Ford Focus EV |
A plug-in hybrid, like Chevy Volt or Ford Energi, by its nature is half electric and half ICE car. That brings us to an interesting question of how will the dash and console displays of Energi look like - will they be like the C-Max (or Focus) or like the Focus EV displays or some kind of a curious combination ?
The starting point, of course, is the Ford Fusion Hybrid and the Focus EV dash shown recently seems to be an updated version of Fusion Hybrid display for specific EV related functions. There are two displays that Ford uses in these vehicles. An LCD display directly behind the steering wheen in place of the analog dials that you see in most conventional ICE cars and an LCD display on the center console.
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| Fusion Hybrid 2010 Dash LCD display |
Fusion Hybrid has what Ford calls the Smart Gauge directly infront of the driver. The dash has a speedometer at the center and on either side you get to see various bits of information regarding how you are driving, how much energy remains etc. Very neat. It has been almost universally praised for its layout. In Focus EV it will be customizable. Instead of the leaves that grow as you drive better, in Focus EV we will see butterflies. Not the best way to lessen any range anxiety the driver might feel, if you ask me. There is a lot to talk about these displays, so, in future blog postings I'll go into the details of both the Fusion Hybrid and the Focus EV's diaplays, but for now I'll just let you take in the photos.
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| Ford Fusion Hybrid 2010 Console |
The console dislpay LCD gives the usual navigation and entertainment options that come standard with Sync, jointly developed with Microsoft. Apart from that, in Focus EV, we will get some more information regarding battery charge available, range within which that charge will let you drive etc. No, these won't be 17" LCDs like in Tesla Model S (probably a $5,000 option), but a more modest 7".
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| Focus EV 2012 Center Display |
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| Focus EV Windows Phone 7 App |
The other
in thing with PlugIns is now to have a mobile phone application by which you can control things like charging of the car and also get information about the state of the battery charge. Nissan Leaf has it, so does Chevy Volt. Ford, naturally, showed an app for Focus EV using the newly released Windows Phone 7 on, incidentally, Samsung Focus.
Couple years back, Ford put in a few Escape PlugIn hybrids into fleet service. Here is the console display on those for comparison. It shows Prius type of animation showing the flow of energy.
Finally, we come to how C-Max, the ICE car that will be on sale this year, looks like. We should expect the general layout of instruments on Energi similar to this, except for the dash - which we can be sure will have Fusion Hybrid / Focus EV type of LCD dash discussed earlier.
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| C-Max 2011 ICE |
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