It also gets active park assist with front and rear parking sensors and active lane control. The $34,595 Escape Titanium comes with the hybrid drivetrain standard, and adds B&O sound, 19-inch wheels, navigation, leather upholstery, acoustic glass, ambient lighting, and a 110-volt AC power outlet. Safety features include standard automatic emergency braking, but beyond that, the 2020 Escape SE Sport Hybrid comes with a power tailgate, a panoramic roof, navigation, adaptive cruise control, 19-inch wheels, the 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster, and black trim-all for $29,450. Its second-row seat slides a bit less (about two inches) than the gas-only car due to the battery placement, and its interior volume is down about 5 cubic feet to about 60 cubic feet total for the same reason. Inside, the hybrid loses slight amounts of interior capacity. It shares their vaguely Model 3-like front end styling, and gets a full digital gauge display as standard, while it’s an option on other models. The Escape hybrid doesn’t vary much in other ways from the gas-powered Escapes. That would also land in a competitive spot against the upcoming Honda CR-V Hybrid. Final EPA numbers still are in the offing, though engineers told Green Car Reports that they expect to equal or better the Toyota RAV4 Hybrid’s 40-mpg EPA combined rating. It’s as close as Ford has come to a penalty-free hybrid. It’s quiet, too, at least in Titanium trim, where the active noise cancellation that comes with all Escape hybrids gets augmented by laminated acoustic glass. It steered with crisp response, and its ride felt nearly as well-controlled as the 250-hp car we’d driven the day before. Those soaring fuel-economy numbers are nearly the only clue that the SE Sport Hybrid we sampled was a hybrid. With the delayed rise of engine revs to prods of the accelerator, the powertrain behaved, in some ways, like early Chevy Volts and the late, unloved Cadillac ELR-all to the Escape’s fuel-economy benefit. The ‘L’ button’s regen helped us game the powertrain over the 40-mpg barrier easily, as often as we could engage it on downhill stretches. The complex software managing these mechanicals-and the battery’s charge-in the 2020 Escape Hybrid call on the gas engine less than the C-Max or Escape Hybrid.Īs we slung the hybrid through Kentucky back roads, the engine’s gruff note came on episodically rather than constantly. The eCVT uses a motor that couples with the engine via a planetary gear, like the setup in the Toyota Prius. Through a redeveloped electronic CVT and front- or all-wheel drive (no through-the-road AWD, engineers say, for reasons of efficiency), Ford draws a net of 200 hp from the Escape’s new hybrid drivetrain, with 152 lb-ft of torque from the gas engine alone. The pack’s cells are supplied by Panasonic, in a briefcase-sized parcel that sits below the rear passenger seat.Įngineers have used the occasion not just to switch from nickel metal hydride batteries to lithium-ion, but to rely on that battery pack far more often to supplant the gas engine for efficiency that approaches that of the former C-Max Hybrid. Today we’re besting that with the non-plug-in Hybrid, which pairs an electric motor with a 2.5-liter inline-4 and a 1.1-kwh lithium-ion battery pack. With either of the new hybrid models, that number rises by at least 30 percent in combined driving. Fuel economy of up to 30 mpg combined emanates from the front-drive turbo-3. Gas-only 2020 Escapes come with either a 180-hp turbo-3 engine or a 250-hp turbo-4 coupled to an 8-speed automatic that channels power to the front wheels or to all four wheels. The last Escape Hybrid left Ford’s lineup in 2012, but the gas-electric crossover returns this year as a tag team.
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