Lifeguards Get 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid

FORD ESCAPE HYBRID DELIVERS TOTAL PACKAGE FOR LOS ANGELES COUNTY OCEAN LIFEGUARDS
Ford to provide a fleet of 45 customized Escape Hybrids to the Los Angeles County Ocean Lifeguards.
The full-hybrid SUVs will be used for rescue patrol along 72 miles of Southern California coastline.
The front-wheel-drive Escape Hybrid is the most fuel-efficient SUV on the planet, returning 34 mpg in city driving and 30 mpg on the highway.
Intelligent four-wheel-drive models are also available, with fuel economy of 29 mpg city and 27 highway.

LOS ANGELES, May 23, 2008 - Ford Motor Company is teaming up with the Los Angeles County Lifeguards, a division of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, to help save lives while protecting the environment. Today, Ford presented the squad with the first 10 of a fleet of 45 eco-friendly Escape Hybrids with Intelligent four-wheel-drive, specially equipped for use on rescue patrol along 72 miles of Southern California coastline.

"We are the largest lifeguard organization in the world, and we have always blazed the trail for the profession," said Mike Frazer, chief, Lifeguard Services, Los Angeles County Fire Department. "We wanted to be the first public safety agency in the country to go green."

"This continues the Escape Hybrid's impressive string of endorsements," said Hal Dewsnap, California regional sales manager for Ford Motor Company. "In addition to being clean and fuel-efficient, the Escape Hybrid is highly functional and durable, proven in hundreds of thousands of miles in taxi service in New York and San Francisco. Now, we are adding lifeguard duty to the list."

There is no better vehicle for that assignment than the world's most fuel-efficient SUV. The front-wheel-drive Ford Escape Hybrid returns 34 mpg in city driving and 30 mpg on the highway. Intelligent four-wheel-drive models, like the ones used by the lifeguards, return 29 mpg city and 27 highway.

"The Escape Hybrid is one of the cleanest vehicles available today," said Dewsnap. "It meets California's strict Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle (PZEV) standard. To put it in a California summer context, this means it releases fewer smog-forming emissions into the atmosphere during a three-hour drive (about 180 miles) than grilling one hamburger in your back yard."

Frazer says he knew that the Escape Hybrid was an ideal choice from an environmental standpoint, but he admits to having some initial reservations about whether an SUV would function as well on the beach as the compact pickup trucks the lifeguards were used to driving.

"The switch from a pickup to an SUV was something new to us, but when Ford brought the Escape Hybrid down to the beach, we were amazed at how well it performed," he said, adding that he was particularly surprised by the vehicle's ability to navigate through the sand without getting stuck.

With the Escape Hybrid, Frazer says he was also able to make more precise turns, enjoy extra headroom (he's 6'5") and gain greater visibility, which is a huge safety plus on the beach.

"We need to be able to see as much as possible because there's so much activity on the beach, especially in the summertime," he said. "When we're responding to a rescue, we want to get there quickly and safely."

Shortly after that initial field test, a team of designers from Ford's Irvine studio visited the beach to do a little "guerrilla research," says Ford designer Jeff Nield.

"These people save lives, so this was not just an exercise in styling," said Nield. "We wanted to design features for them that are functional and could potentially save them valuable time in an emergency situation."

Careful inspection of the previous trucks the lifeguards were using revealed various makeshift storage areas for critical equipment.

"What happened in the past is that different lifeguards would set vehicles up differently, so if you worked at one beach and then got called in a crisis to another location, you would have to search to find the emergency tools you needed because the storage area was not standardized," he said.

The Ford designers decided to remove 60 percent of the rear seat on the driver's side and replace it with a rescue equipment storage unit - an aluminum box with specially designated spaces for important emergency equipment, such as defibrillators, trauma boxes and oxygen tanks.

The remaining 40 percent of the seat was left intact in case the lifeguards had to transport someone, such as a lost child.

According to Ford Design Project Manager, Greg Hutting, the lifeguards' multiple radios also presented the design team with a challenge.

"In the previous vehicle, they had three or four different radios pushed wherever they had room," he said. "We pulled out the center console and replaced it with a radio rack that keeps all of their equipment lined up and organized."

Ford designers also outfitted the Escape Hybrids with a custom-fit roof rack for the lifeguards' paddle board and spine board, and easy-to-clean rubber floor mats and cargo liners.

When it came to the exterior, Nield says it was important to make the vehicle look "fresh but not trendy." The vehicles were painted a vibrant yellow - iconic for lifeguards - and then detailed with authoritative graphics and finished off with dark wheels.

"We really pushed to make the vehicle look as rugged as possible," said Nield.

Frazer says he couldn't be more pleased. "The vehicles look amazing, they perform great and they are hybrids, so they are good for the environment," he said. "It's a win, win, win situation for us.

It's also a win for Ford Motor Company.

"These guys are going to be pushing these vehicles to the limit, and they need the best vehicle to get the job done," added Nield. "They had choices, and they chose the Ford Escape Hybrid."

Source: TheyReviewed

Photos & Pictures Of 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid For Life-Guards

Hybrid Car - Facts

Some Hybrid Car Facts

• Current hybrid cars can get up to 60 miles to the gallon on the highway. In the near future, hybrid cars are expected to get fuel mileage as high as 190 miles per gallon!


• Hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius produce 90% less pollutants than comparable non-hybrid cars. By putting less harmful chemicals in the environment, the harmful effects of pollution can be halted or even reversed.


• The United States government supports hybrid car ownership by allowing a tax write off. In 2005, this rebate may be as high as $5000!


• While it is true that hybrid cars do have expensive parts, they also have warranties that provide free replacement of the most expensive parts for many years.


• Hybrid cars show much lower depreciation rates than standard gasoline cars. They are now and will continue to be in extremely high demand, so hybrid cars keep their values very well, making a hybrid car a sound investment.


• Some consumers worry that hybrid cars may not last as long as other cars, but it is not abnormal for a hybrid car to run like new when it has 250,000 miles on it. The best part - hybrid cars don't require any more maintenance than gasoline cars.


• Hybrid cars aren't a fad. Nearly every major automobile manufacturer has announced either the launch of a hybrid car or plans for a launch. A large part of this is due to the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulation, by which an automaker must maintain a minimum mileage of 27.5mpg across its product line. By investing in hybrid technology, they can offer faster, larger engines in the rest of their line.

Hybrid Cars - An Introduction

A hybrid car is a passenger vehicle that is driven by a hybrid engine, which is any engine that combines two or more sources of power, generally gasoline and electricity.

There are many people who have heard a lot about hybrid cars but are still not sure what exactly is the fuss about. What I can assure you is that once you are through with this short article below, you won’t ask:
What the difference between a conventional car and a hybrid car??
Can a hybrid car match up to the performance of our conventional cars??
How do hybrid cars manage to achieve high fuel economy??
Are there any real benefits of using a hybrid car??

Let’s begin by finding what makes a hybrid car different from others.
A gas-powered car has a fuel tank, which supplies gasoline to the engine. The engine then turns a transmission, which turns the wheels.An electric car, on the other hand, has a set of batteries that provides electricity to an electric motor. The motor turns a transmission, and the transmission turns the wheels.
The gasoline-electric hybrid car is just what it sounds like -- a cross between a gasoline-powered car and an electric car. The hybrid is a compromise. It has the best of both the gasoline and the electric cars. It attempts to significantly increase the mileage and reduce the emissions of a gas-powered car while overcoming the shortcomings of an electric car.A gasoline car meets these requirements but produces a relatively large amount of pollution and generally gets poor gas mileage. An electric car, however, produces almost no pollution, but it can only go 50 to 100 miles (80 to 161 km) between charges. And the problem has been that the electric car is very slow and inconvenient to recharge.A gasoline-electric car combines these two setups into one system that leverages both gas power and electric power.
You can combine the two power sources found in a hybrid car in different ways. One way, known as a parallel hybrid, has a fuel tank that supplies gasoline to the engine and a set of batteries that supplies power to the electric motor. Both the engine and the electric motor can turn the transmission at the same time, and the transmission then turns the wheels. By contrast, in a series hybrid, the gasoline engine turns a generator, and the generator can either charge the batteries or power an electric motor that drives the transmission. Thus, the gasoline engine never directly powers the vehicle.The structure of a hybrid car harnesses two sources of power to increase efficiency and provide the kind of performance most of us are looking for in a vehicle.

Now let’s check out the performance aspect of a hybrid car.
The key to a hybrid car is that the gasoline engine can be much smaller than the one in a conventional car and therefore more efficient. Most cars require a relatively big engine to produce enough power to accelerate the car quickly. In a small engine, however, the efficiency can be improved by using smaller, lighter parts, by reducing the number of cylinders and by operating the engine closer to its maximum load.This explains why two of the same model cars with different engines can get different mileage. If both cars are driving along the freeway at the same speed, the one with the smaller engine uses less energy. Both engines have to output the same amount of power to drive the car, but the small engine uses less power to drive itself. But how can this smaller engine provide the power your car needs to keep up with the more powerful cars on the road?
The gas engine on a conventional car is sized for the peak power requirement (those few times when you floor the accelerator pedal). In fact, most drivers use the peak power of their engines less than one percent of the time. The hybrid car uses a much smaller engine, one that is sized closer to the average power requirement than to the peak power.

Its time to find the secret behind its high fuel economy.
Besides a smaller, more efficient engine, hybrids use many other tricks to increase fuel efficiency. To squeeze every last mile out of a gallon of gasoline, a hybrid car can:• Recover energy and store it in the battery: - Whenever you step on the brake pedal in your car, you are removing energy from the car. The faster a car is going, the more kinetic energy it has. The brakes of a car remove this energy and dissipate it in the form of heat. A hybrid car can capture some of this energy and store it in the battery to use later. It does this by using "regenerative braking." That is, instead of just using the brakes to stop the car, the electric motor that drives the hybrid can also slow the car. In this mode, the electric motor acts as a generator and charges the batteries while the car is slowing down.• Sometimes shut off the engine: - A hybrid car does not need to rely on the gasoline engine all of the time because it has an alternate power source -- the electric motor and batteries. So the hybrid car can sometimes turn off the gasoline engine, for example when the vehicle is stopped at a traffic light.

Finally let’s see if there are any benefits of a Hybrid Car.
You might wonder why anyone would build such a complicated machine when most people are perfectly happy with their gasoline-powered cars. The reason is twofold: to reduce tailpipe emissions (which ensure cleaner air for all of us to breathe, slows down global warming and also gets you tax concession) and to improve mileage (which leads to more savings, less trips to gas station and longer drives at a stretch). And above all a hybrid car owner is looked up with much respect that his peers driving the conventional car can’t expect. These goals are actually tightly interwoven.

List of some famous hybrid cars:
Honda Accord Hybrid
Honda Civic Hybrid
Lexus GS 450h
Nissan Altima Hybrid
Saturn Aura Green Line
Saturn Vue Green line
Toyota Camry Hybrid
Toyota Prius