New Mondeo spearheads Ford’s ramp-up of bio-fuel models
Ford announced an expansion in its flexifuel range. Flexifuel allows a vehicle to run on either regular petrol or E85 – an 85/15 percent bio-ethanol/petrol blend – and automatically offsets any carbon emissions produced because more crops are always produced to meet the demand for fuel. Ford president and CEO John Fleming confirmed that the existing Focus and C-Max flexifuel cars would be joined by Mondeo, Galaxy and S-Max derivatives, which will all come on stream from early 2008.
Along with plans to develop a broad range of alternative fuel technologies for Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo, the move leaves the Ford empire in a stronger position to meet the huge CO2 cuts recently proposed by the government. In fact, a sub-100g CO2g/km Focus is promised within five years. Ford has had great success with its flexifuel Focus in Sweden where the infrastructure is sufficiently developed to make it a viable alternative to petrol, and the Scandinavians have been key to the 28,500 flexifuel cars sold so far in Europe. With its relatively low population-to-landmass ratio, Sweden has also proved to be a sustainable market, overpopulated countries like Britain simply not having enough space to grow the volume of crops required.
However, that’s all about to change. Next generation fuels will be able to process more of the crops produced – one Ford spokesman told CAR Online that sticks wouldn’t be out of the question – meaning our limited resources could be used far more efficiently. All Ford need now is government support to get the infrastructure up and running. Unfortunately that’s the largest obstacle of all…