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If Ford did in fact infringe on these patents, then I hope that they do the right thing and pay the patent holder a fair royalty. http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140220/AUTO0102/302200079/Ford-sued-over-use-company-s-hybrid-vehicle-inventions Ford sued over use of company's hybrid vehicle inventionsSusan DeckerBloomberg NewsFord Motor Co., the second-biggest U.S. automaker, is accused of developing its hybrid vehicles using technology from a Baltimore company that won a patent-infringement case against Toyota Motor Corp., maker of the Prius. Paice LLC, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, says hybrid and plug-in versions of Ford’s C-Max, Fusion and Lincoln MKZ all infringe its patents covering ways to control electric motors and internal combustion engines so they have increased fuel efficiency and reduced emissions without any loss of performance. Ford had licensed one of Paice’s patents under a deal struck in 2010. The two companies agreed not to litigate over other patents until Jan. 1, 2014, to give them time to reach a broader settlement. The negotiations, according to Paice’s complaint, were “short and one-sided.” “The truth is that Ford built its new hybrid system by relying heavily on the hybrid vehicle inventions it learned from Paice,” the company said in the suit, filed in federal court in Baltimore. The Abell Foundation, a nonprofit group that invests in Baltimore-area companies including Paice, also joined the suit against Ford. Alex Severinsky, a Soviet emigrant and engineer, created Paice to commercialize his work on a high-voltage method to power gas-electric hybrid motors. From 1999 to 2004, Severinsky and other Paice officials held more than 100 meetings and interactions with Ford to help the automaker develop a hybrid engine that would increase gasoline mileage without losing performance, according to the 50-page complaint. At the same time, Dearborn-based Ford was working with Toyota to develop a hybrid vehicle using Toyota’s Prius as a template. Paice says that Ford was sharing its technology with the Japanese automaker. Paice won a patent-infringement trial against Toyota in 2005 and the two companies reached a global settlement in 2010 on the eve of another trial that might have resulted in an import ban on Toyota vehicles had Paice won. Ford sought to pre-empt the latest lawsuit. It filed a complaint in December in Delaware Chancery Court seeking a court ruling that Paice couldn’t file a complaint under the terms of their 2010 agreement. The Paice lawsuit doesn’t seek a specific dollar amount from Ford. According to the complaint, Paice offered to license the technology to Ford for $150 per vehicle in 1999. Ford’s U.S. hybrid and electrified vehicle sales in 2013 climbed to 85,919, more than double the 33,476 a year earlier. By May last year, the automaker had beaten its previous annual best for hybrid and electrified U.S. vehicle sales, achieved in 2010. Ford and Toyota last year ended their collaboration on gasoline-electric systems for pickups and sport-utility vehicles. Paice also has pending infringement complaints against Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Motors Corp. over the same patents.

I want to take issue with Ford's marketing of the Fusion and C-Max. Just like in Who Killed the Electric Car? it talks about how the automakers didn't really educate consumers or advertise the electric vehicles we see the same thing today with hybrids and PHEVs. If Ford really wanted to sell the Fusion Hybrid/Energi and C-Max Hybrid/Energi they would target their marketing at people who weren't previously considering hybrids/PHEVs and show them the advantages of these vehicles. But, they don't do this. Ford only advertises the C-Max as a Prius killer trying to convince people that it is better than the Prius. If you were not previously considering a Prius then this advertising is wasted on you. Also, many people have a negative image of the Prius in their mind, linking the C-Max with the Prius in advertising is not going to sell C-Maxes to those people. The Fusion Hybrid is advertised like a footnote at the end of the regular Fusion commercials and nothing is done to tout the benefits of the Fusion Hybrid in comparison with the gas Fusion. Also, where is the advertising for the Energi models??!? I have seen nothing other than the banner on Ford's website that occasionally displays the C-Max Energi and Fusion Hybrid when going to Ford.com. There is a scene in Who Killed the Electric Car? that mentions how GM went about contacting people who were interested in buying the EV1 and telling them all the limitations of the vehicle and then proceeding to claim that no one wanted it. Nowadays there is not enough done to advertise the benefits of buying a Fusion Hybrid over buying a Fusion EB. There appears to be ZERO advertising about the benefits of buying an Energi model over buying a gas only vehicle. This is very disappointing. A few months ago I made a comment about how I'm not convinced that Ford really wants to sell these cars because of how they had to know that there would be an uproar about the real world fuel economy. I don't think that the engineers, marketing people and executives at Ford are so stupid that they didn't expect some backlash for building a car to ACE the EPA tests that would thus perform worse for many people in real life. When regular cars that are not built to ace the EPA tests often perform worse in real life for some drivers and better for others there is no way that Ford could have thought that what they did wouldn't cause an outrage from disappointed consumers. It seems that just about all consumers are disappointed. Experienced hypermilers are unable to exceed the EPA ratings in the Ford hybrids like they can in other hybrids. Regular consumers are getting much worse than they expected. And even I am a bit disappointed. I tried to not expect better than 47 MPG overall, but when our past cars have all done better than EPA estimates consistently it is hard to not expect that this car will also exceed those numbers. Sadly we're at 42.1 Lifetime on the dash and have found the city mileage to be more than 47 MPG but the highway mileage to be worse. And I am a bit disappointed. Cognizant of how consumers would react, I question how much they actually wanted to sell the cars...looking at the advertising I also question how much they want to sell the PHEVs. If we think about it, the hybrids and PHEVs and BEVs hurt the Ford dealers. Since we need to change oil less often in our hybrids than a gas car, that costs the dealerships money and costs Ford income from selling parts. Since we need brakes less often we also bring in less long-term revenue. A PHEV is even more extreme with the lack of oil changes and a BEV has no oil changes period, and no other routine maintenance associated with an ICE. This makes me worry that maybe the automakers have engineered the batteries to fail at a certain point, say 100,000 miles since that is beyond warranty outside of California, and then they're hoping to make up this lost revenue replacing battery packs. Since we're driving the first year of cars with a NEW battery pack design who knows what changes have been made. The old NiMH packs were proven to last a long time, but we don't know that about the Li-Ion packs yet. This makes me nervous. I'm not a conspiracy nut, but I try to be realistic. This whole world is corrupt. The system is broken. And who's to say that this isn't going on... Your thoughts?

I have said since January after driving our car on a long road trip and investigating the EPA test cycles and everything else that Ford took a calculated risk here. I doubt they planned for this decision to cost them upwards of $15 million in the cash payments, not counting the brand image damage, stock price hit and lost sales. I'd figure the stock damage alone could be hundreds of millions of dollars depending on how the market reacts today to this news. I wonder now how many people will lose their jobs who were part of the decision to save a maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars by not testing the C-Max separately (I have no idea what it costs a manufacturer to run the EPA cycles on their cars so I'm just guessing) when that decision will now cost Ford hundreds of millions. Some people place the blame squarely on Ford for this saying that they were unethical. The objective of a public company is to bring a return to their shareholders, ethics is not a part of business. I know that many of us likely go through yearly ethics training at work, but I also analyze and audit our employees' p-card usage and I see employees bending the rules and pushing the limits every single month. Just as individual employees think that way, the collective decision making of most companies thinks the same. If companies behaved ethically of their own accord we would never have had the Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, et al scandals. If companies behaved ethically there would be no need for Sarbanes Oxley. We aren't privy to the internal discussions between Ford executives and the EPA to know what happened, but I would venture a guess that the EPA tested the C-Max, got lower numbers and they gave Ford the chance to address it. Ford technically didn't break, or even bend, any rules, but the EPA would have had to release their results which would have made Ford look bad. I think that just as much blame belongs with the EPA as with Ford for having such stupid rules that caused this to happen in the first place. If the EPA had better rules, i.e. mandating all 5 cycles for all vehicles and no more of this letting one vehicle determine the ratings for another when the cd is so different that it will have a material effect on the results. It's also important to note that Ford isn't the only company to do this. Honda just released a new hybrid in Japan that beats the Prius on the Japanese test cycle for fuel economy, but everyone knows that the Honda hybrid will not beat the Prius fuel economy in the real world. Honda merely programmed that car to ace the Japanese tests. So what? Buyer beware is still the adage that we should all live by.

As we near the release of the updates I was thinking it would be good to know who exactly on the forum is willing to get the update first and share their results. If you're willing to get the update first and report back on your results please say so below. My idea is to then create a topic for each user who gets the update early on so that each person can individually report on their results, independent of what other users might say. Also, while we all love sharing our personal experiences and reading those of others they don't always add a lot of value. So also please comment below any ideas you have of more scientific tests that we can do to see the effects of the update. Ideally the guinea pig volunteers would run the tests before the update and then again after the update. Please don't use this topic to discuss the update or say things like "I'm not going first!" as that can be done here. Thank you.