Ford Focus Electric
 

The Ford Focus Electric has been unveiled at the 2011 CES:

CES 2011: Ford Focus Electric ready to steal the EV spotlight — Autoblog Green
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog....1294410720.jpg

The upper grill is all blocked, thankfully...
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog....1294410721.jpg

I rather have that than a Leaf or a Volt. And I'd put an ICE propulsion trailer on it for long trips.

Ditto, except for the ICE addon. Not sure I could pull it off.

From what I can tell they have not released price or a range per charge yet, it does appear to have a 23kwh battery compared to the Leaf's 24kwh battery.
Big disappointment for me is that the battery pack on the Ford looks to be in the back hatch area, taking up cargo space, the other dislike is the liquid cooling, I like to keep liquids away from my batteries and I have heard quote from battery engineers who say that they are glad that they are not the ones responsible for warranties on the battery as there are so many seals and gaskets that seal up the batteries liquid cooling system, so many points that could fail.
Of course the advantage of liquid cooling/heating might be that they get more range out of a given size battery pack, but again, we will see.

Here's a photo of the Focus Electric chassis:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog....s-electric.jpg

And here's the best photo of the rear storage area:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog....s-electric.jpg

...that sure looks like it'd be ass-heavy as hell!

I'll be the first to say something nice about the car ;-)
I love the styling.
Well done Ford for making a mainstream electric car that doesn't look ugly.
The 'grille' is actually attractive since the grille doesn't look like a catfish with braces on its teeth ( like the Leaf )
I see some Aston Martin DB-9 styling in the shape of the grille, and there are no frog eye headlights needed.
The car also doesn't look like a crossbred Honda Civic + Malibu ( the Volt )

The DB-9 grille for comparison : http://avto-russia.ru/autos/aston_ma...rtin_db9_5.jpg

...+1 on the Aston Martin DB-9 resemblance.

I reserve my judgement comparing this to a leaf
(volt isn't even in the running except maybe used 10years from now)
once the following are known 100%

1. Aero/Weight/Range (lets hope ford can make a classy but light/aero electric)
2. Cost/Warranty

The main dissapointment on the leaf is that they would not do anything to the rearend to make the thing TRULY aero, which is what I think would do the most (besides weight) to make electric truly viable.

The insight had the right idea as did the EV1

Cd -

...+2 on the Aston Martin DB-9 resemblance. Even though Ford sold Aston Martin in 2007, it makes sense (to me) that there would be some overlapping design intertia.

CarloSW2