Majeske says there's a famous team of women engineers at Ford's Detroit headquarters who have been w

Next image Previous image Enlarge image A snapshot of menu cards handed out to bloggers at Ford's "Fusion meets Fusion" food event in Seattle. Enlarge image KPLU's Bellamy Pailthorp test driving the 2013 Ford Fusion hybrid in Seattle Enlarge image Credit Bellamy ocean city new jersey hotels Pailthorp / KPLU News Ford Motor company Sustainability Director Carrie Majeske says you can't actually eat the car. But you could feel good about driving one.
Seattleites care about the climate. So much, in fact, that the Ford Motor Company chose to target consumers in the Pacific Northwest with an event celebrating the sustainable elements of its latest car designs.
The event brought together food writers, car critics and tech bloggers, lured in to taste a menu inspired ocean city new jersey hotels by ingredients in the latest line of Ford's cars' seats. Coconut and soy are the biggest innovations.
The seats and headrests in all 2013 Ford Fusion models are made of soy foam. A new one has the equivalent of about 30,000 soy beans in the seats, the company says; the new foam formulation is derived from soybean oil.
I test drove the model in Seattle and found it a smooth and compelling ride, with powerful, energy-generating breaks and an intriguing computer interface in the dash board that coached me to drive in a style that would result in best fuel efficiency. In its default mode, the display ocean city new jersey hotels shows vines that reward you with more and more green leaves, the more efficiently you drive. It's not that different from other hybrids and all-electric cars out there, such as the Nissan leaf, which is also using Seattle as a test market.
"No. You can't eat the car. But this is the straw that's the waste product of the wheat process, " says Carrie Majeske, who is in charge of sustainability efforts at Ford, where she has worked ocean city new jersey hotels for 28 years. "The other part is what will end up in the food that we eat tonight. But we are making the point that we're using natural, grown things in our cars. And they are a lot of times related to food products."
Majeske has watched the Michigan Company go through lots of ups and downs. The Seattle banquet featured a soybean soup and a salad of Wheat Berries and Dandelion greens. Yup, you read that right. Russian dandelions are a possible component in ford's Fusion line. They'd be part of the rubber in cup holders, for example. Majeske told the gathering that they would likely be cultivated in greenhouses overseas. The cars themselves are manufactured in Canada.
Majeske says there's a famous team of women engineers at Ford's Detroit headquarters who have been working hard on all of these issues for years, because they care. They haven't cracked the code to make the dandelion rubber formula work quite yet. But she says the story is good marketing for the thing that really matters: the carbon footprint of this vehicle.