Ford May be Making Some Moves

[zitothebrave]

Like this report. Hopefully this tech is in more cars sooner

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/02/autos/ford-solar-car/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

I think for right now a solar roof, plug in hybrid is the car for America. Until we have longer range batteries or faster recharging this will help it go a long way. I guess when/if this comes out I'll probably ditch my car. I was gonna take it to 250K miles but solar powered was one of the things I was waiting for.

[Krgrecw]

Fords trying to find a niche market to keep up with Tesla. If Tesla can market a sedan in the mid 30's game over. For everyone

[zitothebrave]

I hope Tesla can. I respect them as a company. Ran losses for years while fine tuning their product that they knew was great.

But there's also part of me who wonders if Tesla won't stay on the high end. And leave the lower end to ford and toyota.

[The Chosen One]

Only problem is they'll find some excuse to charge 40k for this car, which ends up almost negating the savings you'd ahve from not filling up on gas so frequently.

[zitothebrave]

Only problem is they'll find some excuse to charge 40k for this car, which ends up almost negating the savings you'd ahve from not filling up on gas so frequently.

40K will probably be about right. Their plug-in C-Max is 33K so 7K for panels isn't out of the question. But it's worth it for me. For me right now I drive super short distances. If I can neutralize 75% of my travel like ford says. And I keep the car for say 175K miles, that means that 43,750 miles would be gas (lets say at 40 MPG) making my gas cost at 3.50 a gallon Makes my gas costs 3,828.13. If I have a Ford Focus at say 30 MPG same 175K the gas cost is 15312.5. So yeah it's more expensive, but who knows where gas will go.

[ESP47]

In a perfect world it's a good idea but those panels aren't going to be nearly as efficient as they say and you're going to end up paying a higher percentage of gas than you think on top of the added costs of buying the vehicle itself. It's going to be a while before this stuff works well enough to save people a ton of money.

[Tapate50]

Got to like what Ford is doing. They are at least trying.

I switched from a Chevrolet gas guzzler to a Ford gas guzzler in 2010. Been very pleased.

[zitothebrave]

In a perfect world it's a good idea but those panels aren't going to be nearly as efficient as they say and you're going to end up paying a higher percentage of gas than you think on top of the added costs of buying the vehicle itself. It's going to be a while before this stuff works well enough to save people a ton of money.

It's still a plug in Hybrid though, so even if you have a cloudy day or whatever you don't have to use gas. And there's other things they're working on too of course like that focusing car port.

Electric is moving forward, lots of cool tech, Tesla has a supercharging station which looks liek a carport and on half an hour of charge you get about a 170 mile range. They project by 2016 that 98% of the American population will be covered by this. Considering they're supposed to have coast to coast covered soon should be awesome. Basically you can drive for about 2-3 hours then take a rest break. It will add time to commute (for example my 400 mile drive from NJ to NH will take about an hour longer since I don't stop) but it will eliminate a major hurdle for the electric car. This goes with places like Walgreens already installing EV hookups. Pretty soon you'll be able to own an EV and drive it with no real worries like you do a gas car.