Ford Motor Company says as many as one in four cars it sells by 2020 will be electrified.

The company says giving more vehicles electric motors and big batteries is needed to meet tightening fuel economy standards and ease emissions, while providing consumers with cars they want to drive. "By 2020, between 10 percent and 25 percent of the fleet will be electrified," said Nancy Gioia, head of Ford's EV program.

Ford is serious enough about cars with cords that it has named Gioia, who started with the company in 1982 as a trainee in the electronics division, global director of vehicle electrification. She's shooting for an ambitious target, considering hybrids currently comprise about 3 percent of the market. But that market is expected to grow, and Ford says vehicles like the Fusion Hybrid will be the bulk of its electrified fleet for the foreseeable future.

"The hybrid will dominate that market through 2020," Gioia told Wired.com.

But Ford is hard at work on an electric delivery van slated for next year, an electric car we'll see in 2011 and a plug-in hybrid we'll see the year after that.

Hybrids and EVs are but one part of CEO Alan Mulally's push to increase the efficiency of Ford's entire lineup. The centerpiece is Ford's EcoBoost engines, which the company says deliver 20 percent more fuel economy and 15 percent less pollution than comparable engines with no loss in performance. Ford plans to offer the turbocharged direct-injection engines in 90 percent of its vehicles by 2013.

Other tech slated for the showroom includes dual-clutch transmissions, electric power steering and increased use of aluminum, magnesium and high-strength steel to cut the weight of every vehicle by 250 to 750 pounds.

"We are focusing on sustainable technology solutions that can be used not for hundreds or thousands of cars, but for millions of cars," Mulally said.

Gioia says hybrids, plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles will play an increasingly vital role in the push toward more environmentally friendly motoring. Ford brought a prototype of its Focus EV to San Francisco and let us take it for a spin downtown. It was utterly unremarkable, save for the excellent torque, but then that's the point. Ford wants the Focus EV to be largely indistinguishable from the gasoline version.

"The Focus is the DNA," said Steve Daleiden, Ford's powertrain system engineering leader. "The Focus is the benchmark."

As such, the car isn't terribly quick – Daleiden says the goal is a zero to 60 time in the nine- to 10-second range – but it was peppy in traffic. Daleiden wouldn't offer any performance or technical specs but said Ford is shooting for a range of 100 miles from a 23-kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery.

"We're pretty sure we can get there," he said. The prototype has a range of about 80 miles and needs 10 to 16 hours to recharge at 110 volts, and about half that at 220. Ford is keeping mum on who's supplying the batteries, but the drivetrain has been developed with a lot of help from Magna International, one of the world's leading automotive engineering and component suppliers.

"I'd say the prototype is about 60 percent of what we'll see in production," Daleiden said. "There is a significant amount of engineering work to be done."

There's no word yet on just what the car will look like – those cool Focus EVs you've seen on The Jay Leno Show are prototypes based on the European-spec Focus. But it will be built on Ford's global C platform, the chassis underpinning the Focus, C-Max and Transit Connect vehicles. Ford has the capacity to crank out as many as 2 million C-platform vehicles annually, but Daleiden says EVs will comprise a fraction of that.

"We're looking at 5,000 to 10,000 vehicles a year to start," he said. "We'll see what the demand is and go from there."

No word yet on the price, but Gioia says the goal is to make it "affordable" because "this is not about a small niche. This is about affordable transportation for the masses."

Ford plans to roll out 15 prototypes in London next year to begin testing the cars and their charging stations. The tests mirror those currently underway in the United States, where the Department of Energy, the Electric Power Research Institute, Southern California Edison and 10 other utilities are testing a fleet of 20 Ford Escape plug-in hybrids. Ford says the vehicles have logged more than 75,000 miles during the past two years. The vehicles are helping everyone involved study battery technology, system integration, customer vehicle usage and charging patterns, as well as grid infrastructure.

Ah, the grid. Mark Duvall, director Electric Power Research Institute, says 10 million electric vehicles would need less than 1 percent of the juice generated in the United States. Each of those cars would draw about 700 watts, he said. "Three plasma TVs, in one year, use about as much power as a Ford Escape plug-in hybrid," he said.

That said, the grid may need improvements at the local level – new transformers, for example, or overhauled substations – to handle a big influx of electrified vehicles, he said. "But there's a near-term investment that leads to a long-term benefit," he said. The benefits include a more efficient generation system with greater integration of renewable energy sources and reduced need for new peaker plants, which run only at times of high demand. Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, says utilities could even reimburse owners for the battery storage offered when the cars are plugged in.

More important, Duvall said, is making sure the cars can communicate with the grid. That will allow the cars to charge themselves at optimal times, minimizing the impact on the grid and avoiding peak times. Ford already is developing a system by which its electric cars can communicate with the grid called V2G technology and says it could be ready by 2013.

Photos: Jim Merithew / Wired.com

Ford got a big assist from Magna International, which developed much of the electric drivetrain in the Focus prototype. We'd love to give you the tech specs, but Ford's keeping mum for now.

The prototype sports a pair of lithium-ion packs that together produce 23 kilowatts-hours. Ford says splitting the pack allows it to more effectively distribute the weight, an important consideration given the two packs weigh a total of 700 pounds. This car is a prototype, and the air-cooled packed in the production model will be more neatly integrated into the vehicle.