Ford's Escape Route

The office feels ordinary, but for Ford it is revolutionary. Engineers and scientists work in adjacent cubicles. "Before, it might have been a half mile apart, but even one building away is a barrier compared with what we have now," says Gee. "It makes a huge difference." Group lunches in the nearby cafeteria evolve into meetings. Hallway chats lead to impromptu problem solving. Once, a couple of engineers at the soda machine discovered a discrepancy in a power-train specification and corrected the issue before the code was written. With thousands of tasks on the to-do list, preventing a problem is as sweet as solving one.

The hybrid group has become the envy of other Ford engineers. "I have engineers who say, 'I wish I could be on that team,' " says Craig Rigby, a technical support supervisor. "Then I tell them the hours." As a way of motivating his weary team, Patil would remind them how fortunate they were. "This was a product that if you did it right, it was going to do a great deal for customers and the company and the country and the environment," he says. "You rarely get a chance to go after something like this in your career. It's what I call the nobility of the cause."

Ford could have done things more simply. It might, for example, have bought part of Toyota's hybrid system, as Nissan has done. But in November 2002, less than two years from the scheduled start of production, Martens decided to develop the technology in-house. The only Toyota patents that it licensed, he says, were to avoid patent infringement. "That was a defining moment," he says. "It took away the safety net."

From a strategic perspective, though, Ford had no choice. It could not be saddled with Toyota's first-generation technology while its rival was busy creating the next system. And buying instead of building would also have denied Ford folks the chance to earn their own patents (more than 100 so far) and develop skills for future projects.

By designing more components and systems digitally, for instance, the hybrid team saved time and money. Engineers could test the interaction between the two engines and the battery on screen, then rework the virtual hybrid. Next, putting "hardware in the loop" allowed them to test an actual part in a virtual vehicle. They could hook up the battery and simulate the rest of the vehicle on computers, resolving many issues before building the entire vehicle. Neither tool was new at Ford, but the team used them more extensively than other teams had. It paved the way.

The team also developed a way to do "rapid prototyping" of the Escape's vehicle control system, or VCS. It's the hybrid's brain, coordinating the engines, brakes, battery, and so on. The engineers would connect a laptop to the vehicle and monitor the system as it was being driven on the test track. Then they'd park and write new code to make improvements, redesigning the system on the spot. Within minutes, they could download the software and, in effect, create a new Escape Hybrid prototype -- another useful tool for other Ford product teams.

When the first prototype was built in late 2000, Deepa Ramaswamy and about a dozen other team members huddled around the vehicle at a Ford test facility in Dearborn, Michigan. They knew the odds were slim that it would start right away. And yet, says Ramaswamy, "you always have the slightest hope."

They couldn't simply turn a key in the ignition. With some 300 or so sensors attached to the vehicle, it looked as if it were on life support. They had to synchronize a series of commands on their laptops. They tried it for the first time and . . . silence.

The Escape Hybrid didn't start that day. Or the next. Or the day after that. "It took several weeks to get it to start, and it took months to work out the bugs," says Ramaswamy.

When it finally did start, it wasn't because of one thing. It was the culmination of hundreds of adjustments to the software, wiring, and hardware. And just as no single person got the credit that day, the choice of who got to drive the vehicle first was democratic. It wasn't Patil, the head of the team, or Ramaswamy, one of the original team members. It was the intern.

Once the hybrid was running, the team focused on how it handled, how much gas it consumed, and how far they still had to go. A year and a half later, Patil took a "street legal" prototype home for testing, and gave his wife and two teenage sons a ride. This was the product that had consumed him for more than two years, the reason he left the house at 5:30 a.m. and had missed a family vacation for the first time in 20 years. They were unimpressed -- which thrilled Patil. "To them it wasn't a big deal, because it didn't do anything weird," he says. "But that was a big deal to me."