Ford's Escape Route

And it needs to make the most of this window. At the New York International Auto Show in April, Bill Ford stood next to a gleaming green Escape Hybrid and said, "It couldn't come at a better time." He was referring to gas prices that were going through the roof. But he easily could have been referring to the recent travails of the automaker founded by his great-grandfather.

The past few years have been especially hard. In 2000, there was the rollover controversy surrounding the Explorer. Then came a flood of lawsuits. A last-place quality ranking in a J.D. Power & Associates survey. Recalls on other vehicles. Upheaval in the executive suite. Two years after earning an industry-record $7.3 billion in 1999, Ford's automotive division lost $8.9 billion. Over the last three years, its U.S. market share has shrunk from 22.8% to 20.5%. Ford also drew criticism last year when it announced that it hadn't met its goal of improving mileage on its SUVs by 25%. Little wonder, then, that everyone from disgruntled environmentalists to impatient shareholders to Ford himself are wondering if the company's first hybrid will be a great Escape in more ways than one.

Ford's Escape Hybrid program got its start in a Toyota Prius, of all places. After being tapped to head the team in late 1998, Prabhaker Patil went for a test drive with then-chairman Alex Trotman. As the two had suspected, the soon-to-be-released Prius sacrificed too much performance. Trotman insisted that Ford's hybrid do better.

To develop its unconventional vehicle, Ford created an unconventional team. Typically, researchers and product engineers don't work closely together. At Ford, in fact, they work in different buildings. Researchers act as consultants; they share their expertise while commuting from the Ford Scientific Research Laboratory. But Ford's team would itself be a hybrid: scientists and product engineers inventing and building software and hardware together, then shepherding their creation through production. "The people story is as interesting as the technology story," says Wright.

Patil, 54, was a hybrid himself, a PhD scientist who worked in Ford's lab for more than 15 years and then in product development for the past four. He sought team members he knew would be open to collaboration. They included Anand Sankaran, 39, who holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and is a nine-year veteran of the research lab. "It has always been my wish to take something into product production," he says. Still, Sankaran was curious about the fit. "There was a little bit of concern, because I come from a background where I deal more with solving problems technically but it's not fine-tuned to be put easily into production."

The creative tension often centered on deadlines. "On one side, you have people with program discipline who said, 'This has to happen at this point and at this point,' " Patil says, "and the other side would say, 'Oh, you want to time an invention?' "

In December 2002, for example, just nine months before the first media test-drive, the team was scrambling to prepare the car for a cold-weather battery test in Canada. In early February, the temperature was expected to reach 40-below -- just right. "If you miss it, you're out of luck," says Gee, the power-train control supervisor. Ford would have to wait another year -- a disaster.

Meanwhile, researchers were still tinkering with the battery, one of the hybrid's main muscles and one of its trickier components. At 330 volts, it's about 27 times more powerful than a standard car battery, and it's stashed under the rear cargo space. It provides power to the electric engine and gets recharged when the brakes' heat is converted into energy. In extreme cold, the battery is vulnerable to overcharging; it can only generate and receive so much power, and if it overcharges, the cells can become damaged. Instead of tossing the problem over the wall, as is often the case at Ford, the researchers worked with the engineers to make sure the vehicle's computers were constantly taking the battery's pulse -- calculating its state of charge some 50,000 times a second -- and providing enough, but not too much, power. The team made the deadline, but just barely. "We were working 16-hour days, seven days a week, right up until February 7," says Gee. "I took Christmas and New Year's off. I didn't do any Christmas shopping. My wife did it. She recognized the situation."

Internally, the hybrid team is simply Team U293. It occupies a long stretch of gray cubicles a one-minute walk from the tinted glass door of one of Bill Ford's offices. The bulletin board celebrates new babies and new patents ("Method for controlling an internal combustion engine during engine shutdown to reduce evaporative emissions"). Schedules wallpaper the conference room, along with a banner that says, "By When?"