Ford Is Chucking A Mountain Of Cash At Making EVs

It’s been a pretty exciting year for Ford. It has gone in hard on its faster products, announcing that it would be building more than 12 performance cars before 2020, including the new GT and Focus RS. To offset all that gas-guzzling performance, Ford has now announced that it is throwing an astonishing $4.5 billion into electrifying its fleet by 2020. All in, it’ll have 13 electric models, with 40 per cent of its worldwide models coming with an electric version over the next four years.

At the forefront of this electrification is the new Ford Focus Electric, which gets an all-new DC fast-charger, allowing customers to charge their cars to 80 per cent in around 30 minutes, giving an additional 100 miles of range - that’s two hours faster than the current Focus EV can manage. It would also mean a quick five minute charge might actually gain you a few meaningful miles of range - enough to get you home comfortably, for example, in desperate situations.

With the Focus Electric, Ford is introducing some new features, such as an LCD instrument cluster that is customisable to allow drivers to see where energy is being wasted, and a Brake Coach, which will train drivers to apply the brakes smoothly to get the most from regenerative braking. Ford has also promised that the Focus will be fun to drive.

With more companies investing in electric technology, it seems that consumers will have no choice but to make the shift to EVs, despite the market’s apparent reluctance to embrace it. It’ll also be interesting to see how quickly infrastructure adapts to more EVs being on the road; anecdotally it’s already clear that London doesn’t have enough on-street charging points, as the ones along my route to work are never empty. But, the EVs are coming, and I for one can’t wait to see how all this investment develops the technology.