pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/green/" rel="tag"Green/a/pa href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/photos/abg-garage-2010-mercury-milan-hybrid/1387763/"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autobloggreen.com/media/2009/03/2010-mercury-milan-hybrid-1280-11_opt.jpg" //abr /div align="center"emstrongsmall2010 Mercury Milan Hybrid - Click above for high-res image gallery/small/strong/embr //divbr /In a recent op-ed piece published in emThe/em emWall Street Journal,/em Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute starts by making a few decent points about fuel taxation and fuel economy rules. Unfortunately, he undermines himself with some blatant errors and misinformation. In discussing how Detroit automakers will deal with new fuel efficiency requirements, he makes the all-too-common mistake of referring to Ford's hybrid system as licensed from Toyota ("Similarly, Ford has the Toyota-licensed hybrid Fusion and will soon produce the European Ford Fiesta in Mexico"). br /br /The reality is that Ford independently developed its own hybrid system at the same time Toyota was masterminding its own. The basic architecture of both systems is the same and both are based on the concepts developed and patented by TRW engineers in the late 1960s. When Ford introduced the Escape Hybrid, Toyota went after the Blue Oval for infringing on its patents. Ford had patents of its own on the technology that Toyota was using. Eventually, the two companies reached a cross-licensing agreement that gives both companies the right to build their own systems. Such cross-licensing agreements are common in these kinds of cases, but Ford emdid not/em use the Toyota hybrid system. The only other company that uses Toyota's system is Nissan for its Altima hybrid, and they actually buy hardware from Toyota. We continue deconstructing Reynolds' arguments after the jumpbr /br /br /div class="postgallery"pstrongGallery: a href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/photos/abg-garage-2010-mercury-milan-hybrid/"Review: 2010 Mercury Milan Hybrid/a/strong/pa href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/photos/abg-garage-2010-mercury-milan-hybrid/1387743/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autobloggreen.com/media/2009/02/2010-mercury-milan-hybrid-1280-01_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/photos/abg-garage-2010-mercury-milan-hybrid/1387742/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autobloggreen.com/media/2009/02/2010-mercury-milan-hybrid-1280-02_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/photos/abg-garage-2010-mercury-milan-hybrid/1387741/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autobloggreen.com/media/2009/02/2010-mercury-milan-hybrid-1280-03_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/photos/abg-garage-2010-mercury-milan-hybrid/1387758/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autobloggreen.com/media/2009/02/2010-mercury-milan-hybrid-1280-07_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/photos/abg-garage-2010-mercury-milan-hybrid/1387757/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autobloggreen.com/media/2009/02/2010-mercury-milan-hybrid-1280-08_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //a/divbr /[Source: a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124649332091983175.html"Wall Street Journal/a]br /emstrongsmallPhotos Copyright (C)2009 Sam Abuelsamid / Weblogs, Inc./small/strong/empa href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/07/05/editorial-attention-i-wall-street-journal-i-ford-does-b-n/" rel="bookmark"Continue reading emEDITORIAL: Attention iWall Street Journal/i - Ford does bnot/b use Toyota's hybrid system!/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/07/05/editorial-attention-i-wall-street-journal-i-ford-does-b-n/"EDITORIAL: Attention iWall Street Journal/i - Ford does bnot/b use Toyota's hybrid system!/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:10:00 EST. 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