FORD'S HYBRID SUV PROJECT TEAM RACES TO THE FINISH In the spring of 2003, Phil Martens saw trouble down the road. As head of product development for Ford, he was supervising the creation of what could be one of the most important vehicles in company history. While the car wasn't due to come out until the fall of 2004, the team needed to be in launch mode right then to stay on schedule. It wasn't It was still pulling marathon hours just trying to get the thing running properly. The vehicle was the much-anticipated gaselectric hybrid that CEO Bill Ford Jr. had been touting for a couple of years as emblematic of the new, environmentally friendly Ford. The Ford Escape Hybrid would be the first hybrid SUV; it would handle like a muscular V-6. yet sip gas-36 miles per gallon, about 50% better than a standard Escape; its emissions would be minuscule. It was the most technically advanced product the automaker had ever attempted to put into mass production The hybrid team was packed with PhDs, but for all of their technical prowess, the brainiacs had one weakness: little launch experience. Martens needed someone to crack the whip without destroying morale, someone to persuade the scientists to stop perfecting and start finishing the vehicle. That someone was Mary Ann Wright-part spark plug, part disciplinarian, and all Ford. A self-described "car nut," Weight, 42, has launched Sables, Taurus, and Lincolns. Her discipline is legendary. Twelve-plus-hour days. Five hours of sleep. Four A.M. workouts. She has blond bangs, blue eyes, a firm handshake, and the confidence of someone who doesn't miss deadlines. "My launches are really, really good," she says. Somehow this doesn't come across as a boast Even with Wright on board, staying on schedule wasn't a sure thing. Introducing one major technology is a challenge. The Escape Hybrid contains nine such technologies. By the time Ford sends it to dealers in September, this SUV will have been in the works for a little more than fi ve years. In addition to overcoming herculean technical hurdles, Ford collaborated with suppliers around the globe. This is an unusually complex team with little or no experience with hybrid technology." says Martens, and they're introducing this unusually complex technology into a mainstream manufacturing system without any flaws." Creating a dramatically different product is a staggering challenge for any organization, but for the oldest and second-largest American automaker, it's a higher, steeper mountain to scale. Ford Motor Co. has been making cars for 101 years cars with one motor Open the hood of a hybrid, and you'll find two: one gas, the other electric As a "full" hybrid, the Escape can run on either motor. Its network monitors an array of computers to determine which motor can drive the wheels most efficiently. In an instant, the vehicle balances the dueling demands for power and acceleration and for high mileage and low emissions. For team member Tom Gee, Ford's announcement of a massproduced hybrid was "the equivalent of Kennedy saying, We're going to the moon by the end of the decade." At Ford, vehicle programs are typically ranked 1 to 10, according to the complexity of the power train. This was a 20," says longtime researcher Mike Tamor. The stakes are particularly high because Honda and Toyota introduced their hybrids in the United States fi rst-in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Although they lacked the power and roominess of conventional cars, the first gas-electric models found a niche audience. Last year, Toyota released a zippier Prius, but Ford insists that its Escape is going where no hybrid has gone before: into the mainstream. The pitch? No compromises on acceleration, towing capacity, cargo space, fuel economy, or emissions. Not only is it the first hybrid manufactured by an American automaker, but it's also the first hybrid SUV. Ford has plenty of competition in the rearview mirror, though, over the next three years, the major automakers plan to release 20 new hybrids, many of them SUVs and trucks... Ford's Escape Hybrid program got its start in a Toyota Prius, of all places. After being tapped to head the team in late 1998, Prabhaker Patil went for a test drive with then-chairman Alex Trotman. As the two had suspected, the soon-to-be-released Prius sacrificed too much performance. Trotman insisted that Ford's hybrid do better. To develop its unconventional vehicle, Ford created an unconventional team. Typically. researchers and product engineers don't work closely together. At Ford, in fact, they work in different buildings. Researchers act as consultants; they share their expertise while commuting from the Ford Scientific Research Laboratory. But Ford's team would itself be a hybrid: scientists and product engineers inventing and building software and hardware together, then shepherding their creation through production. "The people story is as interesting as the technology story." says Wright Patil, 54, was a hybrid himself, a PhD scientist who worked in Ford's lab for more than 15 years and then in product development for the past four. He sought team members he knew would be open to collaboration. They included Anand Sankaran, 39, who holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and is a nine-year veteran of the research lab. "It has always been my wish to take something into product production," he says. Still, Sankaran was curious about the fit. There was a little bit of concern, because I come from a background where I deal more with solving problems technically but it's not fi ne-tuned to be put easily into production." The creative tension often cantered on deadlines. "On one side, you have people with program discipline who said, 'This has to happen at this point and at this point,'' Patil says, "and the other side would say, 'Oh you want to time an invention?... internally, the hybrid team is simply Team U293. It ocčupies a long stretch of gray cubicles a oneminute walk from the tinted glass door of one of Bill Ford's offices. The bulletin board celebrates new babies and new patents ("Method for controlling an internal combustion engine during engine shutdown to reduce evaporative emissions”). Schedules wallpaper the conference room, along with a banner that says, "By When?" The office feels ordinary, but for Ford it is revolutionary, Engineers and scientists work in adjacent cubicles. "Before, it might have been a half a 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, 1 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.". After putting his foot down in the spring of 2003 about the Escape Hybrid's launch. Martens gave the team a rare gift no outside interruptions. From May through December, it wouldn't have to do management reviews and other presentations. Martens would check in periodically and test-drive the latest prototype so he could keep his bosses informed. "I was getting questions from above." he says. "Weekly. Agrin. "Daily." Duning this dark period," Martens says, "I allowed them to be entrepreneurial, and they doubled their productivity Issues that had been stalled for months got resolved: reaching the fuel economy goal and building the first preproduction model. The same people who had been coming into my office saying, 1 don't know how we're going to get there,' were saying within weeks and months, 'My God, we can get there,' Wright recalls. Wright put the pedal to the metal. "Every day is a lost day, she would tell the team. She quickly established a launch plan and a meeting cadence": daily get-togethers at 8 A.M. for two hours, with suppliers in Germany and Japan participating by video. There were also weekly meetings with chief engineers and technical forums to tackle specific issues. Wright devoured the details "Most chiefs won't do that. I find it helps motivate people and helps educate me." Launch mode meant acting as an even more integrated team. During the design phase, small groups had focused on each system to master its separate technology. Now the challenge was orchestrating the interaction between systems. "I told them, If one person is struggling, we're all struggling," says Wright. She could be tough, but Martens believed she was what the team needed, just as Patil and his more collegial style had been effective in development. She was the hybrid team's second motor, if Patil's job was to inspire invention, hers was to wrap it up. Letting go didn't come naturally to scientists like Sankaran. One of his goals was eliminating extraneous engine noise. Like a conductor with extraordinary hearing, he could detect an occasional, almost imperceptible high-pitched tone even though the transmission met the noise requirements. Technically-officially—it was good to go. But, Sankaran says, "as an engineer I wanted to say. What are the physics behind this sound? I can do better." Ultimately, though, hewas persuaded to let it go by taking consolation in another of Wright's reminders: This isn't the only one we'll do." There will be more hybrids down the road. Was it a good idea for martens, head of product development, to have two project managers first prabhakar Patil and then Mary Ann wright - to head the escape hybrid project? Explain