Ford Sticks With Electric Car Battery Design Despite 2 Fires

Ford Motor Co. said Monday that the sodium sulfur battery remains promising for commercial electric cars despite two fires in test vehicles using the high-heat propulsion system.

Ford last week grounded its fleet of 36 Ecostar test vehicles made with the sodium sulfur battery pending an investigation into the cause of the fires.

Some have questioned the safety of using a battery that operates at 600 degrees Fahrenheit, but a Ford spokeswoman said Monday that the battery has too many advantages, such as performance and relatively low cost, to be abandoned. “The stakes are too high,” Pam Kueber said.

Auto makers are racing to build a commercially attractive electric car by 1998, when California will require that 2% of all cars sold in the state be zero-emission vehicles.

All the major car makers have developed electric cars, but each model has problems that the makers fear will make them unappealing to the public.

Kueber said the fire last Friday in an Ecostar in El Monte was similar to one a month ago at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, but she said the second fire disproved an earlier theory that a bad batch of battery cells was to blame.