Thankfully, I didn’t need all day to charge because the Focus Electric uses a 6.6-kilowatt charger capable of replenishing the batteries at twice the rate of a Leaf. This equates to a full recharge from empty to full in a little more than four hours when pulling 240 volts — adding about 20 miles of driving range in an hour, instead of 10 miles for each hour with the Leaf.

There were three or four trips during my week when I would have been forced to leave the Leaf, with its 3.3-kilowatt charger, at home. But I was able to take the Focus Electric because, for example, an hour-and-a-half charge at the Walgreens allowed me to make the 35-mile return to my home charger. I had lunch while I waited at a fast-food joint nearby. Charging at half the rate would have exceeded the limits of my schedule and my patience.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s estimated driving range of 76 miles is spot-on. The farthest I ventured was 83 miles, with the dashboard indicating use of 19 kilowatt-hours from the 23-kilowatt-hour pack. Batteries always keep a kilowatt or two in reserve, so I probably could have pushed the range beyond 90 miles with careful driving.

The Focus once again proved the rule-of-thumb on E.V. efficiency: four miles of driving per kilowatt-hour under favorable conditions, and closer to three when blasting the air-conditioning, running uphill or driving in cold weather.

In terms of understanding range from behind the wheel, I wish Ford had provided a conventional-style analog fuel gauge with a big red needle and hash marks. Instead, the car has a small thermometer-style display of the battery state-of-charge combined with an estimate of the remaining miles. Leaf owners refer to their cars’ similar feature as the guess-o-meter, but the Focus’s predictions were even more scattershot.