Ford’s Sustainability Roadmap: From EVs to a Future Beyond Cars

When Dan Kapp, Ford’s director of power-train research and advanced engineering, came through San Diego a week or so before Christmas, he told me the first all-electric Focus cars would arrive here in time for Valentine’s Day.

Yesterday, the Focus EV road show came through town again as part of a promotional tour ahead of the first deliveries of Focus EVs to Ford dealers in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. After six months, in other words, Ford still says its Focus EVs will be available in San Diego in the next month or so.

When I checked with a Ford spokesman about the delay, he replied in an email: “Ford began making fleet deliveries at the end of the year last year to several key partners such as Google, MSFT and Apple under limited quantity orders. Full production then ramped up in early 2012 with first deliveries to the San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey. They are now making their way to San Diego as part of a phased roll out with the remaining 19 launch markets. San Diego area dealers actually have Focus Electrics right now, which is exciting. Ford plans to expand sales nationally in early 2013.”

That’s not exactly the way I remember it, but hey, it’s no big deal. (Of course, the skeptical journalist in me wonders if such optimism extends in other ways, such as the Focus EV’s estimated 105 MPGe and EPA-rated 76-mile range.) Nevertheless, I’m rooting for the Focus EV and other electric vehicles to take their rightful place under the sun.

The latest EV road show coincided with a presentation that John Viera, Ford’s global director of sustainability and vehicle environmental matters, gave about the company’s green branding strategy at a conference in San Diego on “sustainable brands.” After his presentation, I got to take a Focus EV for a test drive around the parking lot of the Paradise Point Resort, and ask Viera a few questions.

Xconomy: How soon is the roll-out of Focus EVs in San Diego?

John Viera: They’re going to be coming to the dealerships now. We’re producing them now. I would say, you could probably expect to see

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.