I've seen a flurry of news articles in the past few days about Ford making the largest recent gains in fuel economy among the North American manufacturers.
What's Ford been up to?
I got a chuckle out of reading that they have an internal, employee-only EcoModder-type forum, where efficiency ideas are posted & good ones rewarded:
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...for employees to share efficiency ideas and receive compensation for viable suggestions. "When we opened it, we had a flood of ideas"
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Maybe that explains the FoMoCo registered EM members.... Nah.
The company is taking a four-pronged approach to efficiency:
- design efficiency ("putting engineers and senior management through a Design for Energy Efficiency training course"
- weight reduction ("aiming to reach reductions of 250 to 750 pounds in the mid-term")
- "high-value" fuel economy technology (eg. optimizing "deceleration fuel shut-off and electric power assisted steering")
Here's an interesting claim maybe worth dissecting:
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Technologies like those that were added to the 2010 Fusion S gave the vehicle a 17 percent improvement in fuel economy over the 2009 version.
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Source, and some other snippets here:
Ford's Multi-Pronged Fuel Economy Strategy: How The Fusion S Lost 125 Pounds | GreenBiz.com