Ford has taken a pot shot at Toyota’s RAV4 saying its 2015 Kuga will get new engines to out-perform the RAV4 in terms of power and fuel efficiency.

NO DOUBT YOU’VE all seen the TV commercials running at the moment where Ford asks you to consider its range over the “best sellers” in the segment. Well, now its upping the ante by adding three new engines to a revamped Ford Kuga range from January 2015.

A statement from Ford said: “The Ford Kuga will introduce new 110kW and 134kW engines on Ambiente and a high-output 176kW EcoBoost engine on Trend and Titanium to further improve power and fuel economy over 2.5-litre AWD Toyota RAV4 [8.5L/100km combined]”. Fighting words? It gets better.

“When compared with 2.5-litre AWD Toyota RAV4 models, the new 134kW EcoBoost offers more power and torque whilst still offering better fuel economy and the new 176kW high-output EcoBoost engines offers a considerable 44kW and 107Nm over the 2.5-litre Toyota [132kW/233Nm] with comparable economy,” a statement read.

“Our cutting-edge EcoBoost technology offers customers surprising levels of driveability, power and performance whilst still returning great fuel economy; that’s the power of EcoBoost,” said Graeme Whickman, Ford Australia Vice President of Marketing, Sales and Service.

“Globally, we’ve seen customers rapidly shift to EcoBoost technology across our car and truck range.

“We introduced EcoBoost to F-150 three years ago in the United States and the technology now represents 45% of our sales mix with more than 500,000 EcoBoost powered F-150s sold,” he said.

From January 2015, the upgraded Kuga range will see Kuga Ambiente get a new EcoBoost engine offering stop-start technology on automatic and manual transmissions – it also offers 2WD. According to Ford, the new EcoBoost engines see fuel efficiency improve from 6.7L/100km to 6.3L/100km on manual (110kW EcoBoost) and from 7.7L/100km to 7.6L/100km on automatic models (134kW EcoBoost).

“There is a customer-base that appreciates the convenience of an SUV that doesn’t necessarily need all the benefits of AWD and the addition of the two-wheel drive automatic Ambiente provides this customer with the perfect solution.”