The Green Machine

Hybrid cars combine small gasoline engines and high-powered, self-recharging electric motors, and the small hybrids from Honda and Toyota have been so good in recent years they have been scorned as flimsy little tree-hugger gimmicks by SUV-owning neighbors defending their hefty, gas-guzzling trucks. Those opposites seemed hopelessly split, but then along came the Escape Hybrid, and suddenly, environmentally savvy drivers could hug an SUV and a tree with equal righteousness.

I test-drove the Escape Hybrid, a 2005 North American Truck of the Year finalist, for a week in Florida. My trip coincided with the Roy Hobbs national baseball tournament, which is held at the Twins and Red Sox spring training fields in Fort Myers, so I took the opportunity to play with the Minnesota Bandits in the tournament’s over-forty-eight bracket. (I qualified for the tournament because I can still occasionally hit the ball, and I can still occasionally remember being forty-eight.)

With three adults and luggage, we drove from Tampa 130 miles south to Fort Myers. Freeway traffic was flowing at over eighty miles per hour, and while the Escape Hybrid easily held such don’t-try-this-at-home speeds, the trip computer showed up to twenty-eight miles per gallon. In congested city driving, with four adults and equipment onboard, we saw 35, 36, and a high of 38.2 miles per gallon. In an SUV!

They say SUVs are for soccer moms, and Mary Ann Wright is one of those, but she’s also a soccer coach, pilot, and chief project engineer on the Escape Hybrid, which allowed Ford to beat both Honda and Toyota to market with the first hybrid SUV—a winner at $26,380, about $2,500 more than an Escape V–6.

The exceptional 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine, a pair of electric motors, and a Sanyo nickel-metal hydride battery pack, located beneath the rear load floor, join forces to make the Escape work. The gas engine recharges the battery pack, assisted by captured heat from the regenerative brake system. Under twenty-five miles per hour, the vehicle operates on the electric motor only; above fifty-five, the gas engine supplies all the power; both gas and electric combine in various dosages between those extremes and whenever you seek more power at any speed. The gas engine shuts off at stoplights, so hybrids get better fuel economy in town, even in rush-hour congestion.

Ecologically, Hybrid technology reduces hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen by 97 percent and carbon dioxide by half of what they are in the gas-powered Escape V–6, thereby qualifying the SUV as an “Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle.” But it gives up nothing in the way of performance.

Electric power is silent but amazingly potent. You can launch with tire-screeching quickness from stoplights, but the continuously variable transmission plateaus instead of rising to the usual peaks of a normally shifting transmission. The Escape’s standard household electrical outlet is neat, and I plugged my laptop computer into it. When we drove to Sanibel Island and to the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, we discovered another nice feature of electric power. We wanted to sneak up on the alligators, raccoons, and all sorts of exotic birds we saw there, and it was easy in the Escape Hybrid. We just released the brake, and the vehicle glided forward, smoothly and silently, fully on electric power.

There may be no wind chill in Florida, but there were thick forests sadly reduced to thousands of broken and uprooted trees—the massive damage from last year’s hurricanes. Hybrid vehicles are optional, but tree-hugging should be mandatory. 

Reach John Gilbert at jwgilbert.com. He talks new cars with Charlie Boone on WCCO AM–830 Saturdays at 7 a.m.