Ford Focus Electric and MyFord Mobile - Control your car with your smartphone

Imagine a service where you can be sitting at home and just look at the amount of charge on your car left and the amount of time left for the car to carge upto full. Also you could open the hatch, plan your routes and do many other things, all before stepping into your car! Ford just made some tire marks on the stage at CES unveiling its Focus Electric, the first new major vehicle announced at the show. We of course knew it was coming, and we have all the details right here of both the car itself and the MyTouch Mobile app, but we were given an opportunity to get up and close with them both. Click on through for some impressions -- both in visual and textual formats.
First, the car. In the flesh it looks quite good, obviously virtually identical with the latest-generation Focus but graced with an unfortunately (plastic) chrome front grille that dominates the front end -- despite being entirely non-functional. It's completely sealed behind and, honestly, a little unfortunate looking.


But it's still a good looking car, offering a good bit more personality than the Volt and a bit more sophistication than the Leaf. The app too looks sophisticated, clean and reasonably easy to use though it is, at this point, just a non-functional demo. How do we know? Because it's not supposed to be available for Windows Phone 7, and yet it was being demonstrated on Windows Phone 7 (a Samsung Focus, to be exact).





In fact we were so confused by that we said WP7 would be supported in the video, which is a mistake. We're sorry. For now it's officially only coming to BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone, though there'll be an HTML-5 interface available as well. So, really, just about any modern phone will work, but we'd be surprised if we don't see WP7 getting a little more love than it's already getting.


So, again the car isn't due out until sometime in 2013 late 2011 and we have the full details over in our other Focus post. No test drive for now, but hopefully soon.


Update: Ford's wording on the release date is a bit vague, but it's looking like 2013 in Europe and late 2011 in the US for a Focus Electric release.


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