This is a guest post by Manzell Blakeley, who attended the Ford Innovation & Design Fantasy Camp event on behalf of MomMostTraveled.com. Manzell was a guest of Ford, but was not compensated for his time.  These opinions were not boughten. Follow him on twitter.

Ford flew myself and many, many (147) other bloggers out for their media preview event before the North American International Auto Show.

There were many different flavors of bloggers – auto bloggers (@tunedtech); urbanism and design bloggers (@inhabitat; @underworldmagz); and social media professionals (@fatih_gunar) from all over the world – the US, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Turkey, and other nations were represented.

The big news from Ford was their unveiling of the newest iteration of the Ford Fusion.

It’s a mid-size Sedan, and it’s success is very important because it’s the largest automobile market.

Unlike the 1970′s and 80′s when US automakers continually produced putrid watertrash and were getting creamed by Japanese manufacturers, today American cars are totally competitive with the imports like the venerable Civic, Accord, Camry, et al.

The Fusion was introduced in 2005 and essentially replaced the Ford Taurus – a vehicle which we were told by various Ford exec’s “saved the company” with it’s success in the late 1980′s.

The 2013 edition of the Fusion represents the “2nd generation” of the model and is more than just a year-to-year tweaking of style and engine specs. Ford has begun to make many of its cars on a identical “platforms”, which the Fusion shares with the Ford Fiesta, Focus, and Mondeo; it’s related to Ford‘s “One Ford” concept where they are trying to unify their various units across the corporation.

Some of the main features are Ford MyTouch (fascist child-rearing techniques whereby parents can limit the car to whatever speed they like when the kid is driving), Lane Assist (so you can fall asleep at the wheel safely), and a voice system where you can blather like an idiot and the system will tell you where the nearest starbucks is. It can bluetooth with your phone and stuff, I guess that’s nice.

More interesting to me were the engine options. They’re offering both a traditional gas/combustion option; a battery-hybrid, and plug-in electric hybrid engine option.

With their EcoBoost on the gas engine, they get a pretty good 37 mpg on the highway. The regular hybrid is a bit better and gets 47 mpg; but the plug-in electric version gets an excellent 100 mpg “equivalent”.

Traditional hybrids recharge batteries using excess energy from a gasoline engine and during braking, so that all electric energy is ultimately gas-powered.

Plug-in hybrids recharge their batteries from the electricity grid which is why the are so much more gas efficient. Personally, I think 100mpge (miles-per-gallon equivalent) is transformative and given time to permeate the market, will drastically reduce auto-based emissions over the next 20 or 30 years.

The 2013 Focus is the first production vehicle to offer all 3 engine options standard and except for a small exterior badge, the vehicles are identical in trim, options, and appearance. This should be common for all 2014 models in my opinion.

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This is a guest post by Manzell Blakeley.

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