U.S. Carmakers Get Hybrids to Start Gate
American automakers are finally entering the hybrid derby, nearly six years after Honda Motor Co. sold the first gasoline-electric powered car in the U.S.
Ford Motor Co.’s first hybrid model, the Ford Escape sport utility vehicle, is scheduled to arrive in dealers’ showrooms this year. And the company will announce today at the New York International Auto Show that it plans to market its second hybrid SUV, the Mercury Mariner, in 2006 as a 2007 model.
But domestic automakers, trailing far behind Honda and Toyota Motor Corp., the hybrid sales and technology leader, will have a hard time catching up.
By 2007, Honda will have launched hybrid versions of its Accord sedan and its Pilot SUV, adding to the Civic and Insight hybrids it already sells. Toyota, which introduced the popular Prius hybrid in the U.S. in 2000, by then will have begun selling a hybrid Lexus SUV, a hybrid Highlander SUV and possibly a hybrid version of its Camry sedan. And Nissan Motor Co. will have introduced its hybrid Altima sedan.
For all that, Ford doesn’t consider itself a follower.
“We are doing the first hybrid SUV, the first hybrid with no compromise on space, on towing or on anything else, and it will get great fuel economy,” Ford spokeswoman Sara Tatchio said.
The Escape hybrid is expected to get an EPA fuel economy rating of 35 to 40 miles per gallon, versus 19 mpg in the city and 25 on the highway for the all-gasoline version.
Hybrids, which combine electric motors and internal combustion engines to provide increased power with improved fuel economy, have caught on with ecology-minded drivers.
Toyota sold 24,627 Priuses last year and has boosted its 2004 sales goal to 40,000 of the five-seat hybrid sedans. Honda sold 1,168 Insights and, although it doesn’t disclose hybrid Civic sales separately, is believed to be selling about 1,000 of the cars each month.
The Prius is called a full hybrid because it can operate solely with its electric motor at low speeds, with the gasoline engine kicking in at higher speeds.
Honda’s models never operate exclusively on electric power and so are known as mild hybrids. Their gas engines shut down at a stoplight and restart when the driver depresses the accelerator pedal, thanks to a large electric starter motor. The two-seat Insight coupe and the five-seat Civic hybrid sedan apply electric power to the gasoline engine, as a sort of supercharger, when more power is needed at higher speeds.
Ford’s new vehicles will be full hybrids, operating similarly to Toyota’s design. (Ford has said it will introduce a mid-size passenger car with a full hybrid power system, although the launch date hasn’t been disclosed.) Ford has said it expects to sell 15,000 to 20,000 Escape hybrids a year, compared with the 167,678 gasoline-powered Escapes it sold in the U.S. last year.
As for General Motors Corp., it is introducing several pickups and SUVs this year with mild hybrid systems, though it won’t have its first full hybrid to compete with the Japanese and Ford designs until 2007. Chrysler Group plans to sell a mild hybrid engine version of its Dodge Ram pickup late this year.
Meanwhile, Toyota continues to ramp up its hybrid offerings: A hybrid version of Toyota’s large pickup, the Tundra, is expected sometime after the company’s new Tundra plant in Texas opens in 2006. In fact, Toyota executives have said they intend to be able to offer hybrid versions of all their vehicles by 2007 -- if the demand is there.
Not to be outdone, GM has said it can build as many as 1 million hybrid cars and trucks a year starting in 2007.
Lindsay Brooke, a senior analyst at CSM Worldwide in Farmington Hills, Mich., isn’t sure the U.S. market for hybrids is all that broad. “It’s almost too early to tell,” he told Bloomberg News. “There’s an initial fascination period we’re passing through right now.”
