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DRIVEN: Escape Hybrid Aces Road Trip
Written by: Bob Golfen   
06/05/2009
Phoenix, AZ
 
Road trip!

Usually, that means some hot car has landed in my driveway and we’re ready to take it to the highway. Porsche, Lamborghini, Corvette, Mustang GT, Challenger SRT8, whatever inspires us to roar out onto the wide-open desert roads and mountain passes of central Arizona.

Escape Hybrid was a solid seller for Ford during June. (Photo: Bob Golfen) » More Photos
But this was just a little different. More than a testosterone-infused power trip, our most recent jaunt into the wilderness was sort of an academic study. That’s right. No laughing.

What we had was one of the vehicles that kept Ford out of the ditch for the past year, the Escape Hybrid compact SUV. Not exactly a performance machine, but I was curious to see how well this gas-sipping hybrid performed on a fast run to the high-country town of Payson.

This is a gorgeous drive, loaded with long, steep grades, winding curves and beautiful scenery. The route climbs about 4,000 feet in nearly 100 miles of high-speed asphalt highway. Some of the hill-climb portions go on for miles and can be challenging for many vehicles, so it would be a good test of Escape Hybrid’s open-road ability.

Escape Hybrid looks pretty much the same as a regular Escape, aside from some strategically placed "hybrid" labels. (Photo: Bob Golfen) » More Photos
The hybrid did pretty well at keeping up the pace, generally between 65 and 75 miles per hour as we headed north to the tall pines. Escape Hybrid gained some power for 2009, with a 2.5-liter inline-4 that’s been boosted to 153 horsepower from its previous 133, coupled with an electric motor that spins out the equivalent of 94 horsepower.

The continuously variable transmission seemed pretty on the ball, seamlessly keeping the engine in midrange
rpm for most of the time. Although, when we were cruising up those five-mile, six-percent grades, the engine would constantly roar at nearly 5,000 rpm, which got loud and annoying after awhile. It begins to sound like you're riding in a low-flying airplane.

Still, the little hybrid held its speed on hills and felt pretty unstressed by this out-of-town excursion. Generally speaking, the makers of hybrid cars and trucks tout their economy in urban driving, where the electric motors take up much of the low-speed torque demands.

A few years back, I made one other road trip in a hybrid, a Toyota Prius, accompanied by my brother, who’s a physics-minded kind of guy, so he thought the Prius was pretty cool. The Escape Hybrid trip was quite a bit more grueling and wrung out the car a bit more.


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