Secrets of the City

The Trihune had a story a few days ago about how hard it is to find a hybrid car and the one thing I noticed was that Ford and chevy weren’t even mentioned in the article. Maybe that’s their problem. Whether it’s the ranger or a hybrid or what else, maybe they should innovate a little and keep making them.

Ford makes a hybrid model of its little SUV, the Escape. There are even a few prototypes — MNDOT has one — that are flex-fuel hybrids. The Ranger was a flex-fuel vehicle for a number of years, then, without explaination, Ford stop making making their St. Paul trucks flex-fuel.

Odd, in they were marketed in this area, the heart of E85Land in North America. Go figure.

I never had a Ranger, but I did own the GM version, the Sonoma. A nice little truck, with very good gas milage. It could haul a ton of stuff, cheap.

This insight on Ford’s plans, via the Strib.

As I’m sure you have heard, there are plants closing at GM as well, including the Janesville plant in Wisconsin. In Canada, some GM workers are not taking the news lying down.

The Ford Escape hybrid is a actually a parallel hybrid like the Prius and can realistically get in the low to mid 30s mpg. The other SUV hybrids out there are serial hybrids, which get marginally better gas mileage. The primary reason the other automakers have not gone parallel is cost. The serial is much cheaper to make.

Right now the Rangers can get around 20 mpg, which is average for small pickups. If they decided to make the Ranger a hybrid like the Escape, I’m sure it could get 35 or better.

I’ll start taking flex fuels seriously when cellulosic ethanol is widely available.

I’ve driven the same Ford Ranger for over ten years now. It still gets around 25 MPG, which ain’t great, but ain’t bad.

Would be great if the plant could be saved. I might even celebrate by replacing my faithful ‘97 Ranger.

It is interesting that the older models seem to get better mileage than the new. But I’m sure a lot has to do with driving habits as well. 25mpg is great for a small pickup.

I read somewhere that Ford is planning to build is mid-sized pick-up based on a model they sell over seas, and offer it here in the States. They have long wanted to kill the Ranger, and they’ll succeed. It’s dumb, but it is Ford.

Ford made 1,500 all-electric Rangers a few years ago. Sounds like they were great vehicles, but Ford didn’t see enough profit potential. They should reconsider. Plug-ins could be huge in coming years.

I’ll start taking flex fuels seriously when cellulosic ethanol is widely available

That will be awhile, yoder. Unless there are vehicles on the road that can use higher blends like E85, no station will sell E85, cellulosic or otherwise. If critics of biofuels are successful in killing the industry — and its infrastucture — I think it is unlikely cellulosic ethanol will ever happen in the United States, which would be a shame.

In the meanwhile, give us the Volt, please!

You are absolutely right on the plug-ins, miller. Next Big Thing, IMHO.

Good for Norm for not totally rolling over but it’s probably too litte too late, which is too bad. As far as Ford goes in St. Paul, I think the train has left the station but who knows; a lot can happen pretty fast in this world.

The most unreported part of this tale is that about 2,000 very well paying jobs are going away, and everyone with a role in what the site will become seems perfectly content with ‘replacing’ those jobs with Starbucks, Panera and Chipotle.

Yeah, the short-sightedness of the big three is amazing. But I imagine Ford is like any business that is over a hundred years old, riddled with little fiefdoms and petty rivalries while shackled to an institutional culture that frowns upon innovation.

Oh and the reason why older rangers got better fuel efficiency is the improved safety and noise dampening(not very effective if you ask me) on newer models added to the weight… You can have two of the following three: safe, comfortable or fuel efficient, but not all three.

But I imagine Ford is like any business that is over a hundred years old, riddled with little fiefdoms and petty rivalries while shackled to an institutional culture that frowns upon innovation.

Or government. Innovation: bad. Institution: Good.

You can have two of the following three: safe, comfortable or fuel efficient, but not all three.

Might be a little safer out there if the typical Minnesotan didn’t treat the freeway system like their own personal NASCAR track…

It’s simple inertia in most cases. If the institution were traditionally innovative, then they would continue to be so. Even some gov’t agencies. Look at the awesome that is the CBO, DARPA or the BLS(pre its recent decapitation/lobotamy).

Good point, Octaneboy. Tied to just about all of those 2,000 jobs are families members who could lose not only the income, but the health and dental insurance, the retirement benefits, you name it. The closing of the Ford plant would have a negative impact on many more than 2,000 workers.

I thought the Hanso Foundation ran DARPA?

Hanso’s tentacles are everywhere.

“You can have two of the following three: safe, comfortable or fuel efficient, but not all three.“

I just can’t agree with that line of thinking. I understand that for every pound of weight you will affect the fuel efficiency, but our auto and engine designers are all quite capable of increasing fuel efficiency and performance to compensate. They have been able to do this since the 70’s but have chosen not to. This has all been a black hole of fatalist thinking by the design teams who have taken the easy way out for twenty years, coupled with the management’s “bottom line trumps everything”.

If the big three had been working fuel efficiency into their design specs from the beginning they could have been incorporating minute improvements into their engine designs over the past twenty years. By now we would have F-350 super duties that got 35 mpg and they would be riding high on these high fuel prices while the rest of the world’s automakers were running to catch up.

But that did not happen.

An update on the fate of the Saint Paul Ford plant, in today’s PiPress.

Star Tribune, rather.