Britain’s top selling car, the Ford Focus, is now offered with an LPG engine option in models dubbed ‘Focus Bi-fuel’. Priced from £15,000 on-the-road, the new versions are claimed to deliver excellent fuel economy while attracting “a lot of interest” from London motorists because they are exempt from the city’s £5 a day ‘downtown area’ congestion charge.
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“Current demand for LPG is around 4% of overall sales for commercial vehicles and around 2% of all car sales. With our factory produced LPG models, covered by comprehensive warranties and dealer back up, we are well placed to grow with this emerging segment,” said Ford of Britain marketing director Peter Fleet.
“[The Bi-Fuel model is] set to account for around 1.5% of overall Focus sales in the UK. Ford dealerships within the M25 [London’s outer ring motorway] are already seeing lots of customers interested in Bi-Fuel,” he added.
The LPG Focus models have a 1.8 litre engine that develops 117PS and 115Nm of torque at 4400rpm. The LPG tank has a useable capacity of 45 litres and the petrol tank holds 55 litres. The Focus Bi-Fuel can run for around 710 miles using both tanks.
Adding the Bi-Fuel LPG option costs £2000 (including VAT) but the model attracts a 70% government Powershift subsidy (net of VAT) equivalent to £1,191.
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By GlobalDataFord also now offers petrol/LPG versions of its full-size Transit and ‘city size’ Transit Connect commercial vans for £1,800.
All Ford of Europe LPG vehicles are production-line built and each models has been crash-tested to meet new safety criteria, climate-tested and durability-tested to 100,000 miles before production sign off.
The durability testing revealed that petrol engines running on LPG require hardened valve seats to avoid premature wear with an accompanying loss of performance and increased emissions so all of Ford’s LPG vehicles incorporate the tougher seats. The vehicle maker also spent $250,000 developing a new, twin-injector inlet manifold to provide optimum fuel delivery for each Bi-fuel engine.
Spark plugs are also unique to the LPG engines, as are the ignition coils on the Transit, which deliver 25% more power. The LPG vehicles also have a plug-in diagnostic facility that allows dealer technicians to quickly and accurately repair faults.
Ford LPG vehicles have unique instrument clusters with twin fuel gauges on Transit models and a dual functional fuel gauge on Focus and Transit Connect. A fuel select switch displays petrol or LPG fuel tank contents in the same gauge.
Research has shown that car customers prefer to retain the vehicle’s load capacity so the Focus Bi-fuel has the LPG tank in the spare wheel well and a tyre repair kit to deal with punctures. This avoids any reduction in load area capacity.
