Ford CEO Mark Fields confirms 200-mile electric car coming (updated)

What a difference a week makes.

In late April, Ford's director of electrification programs and engineering, Kevin Layden, said the 100-mile range of the 2017 Ford Focus Electric would suffice for most drivers.

But then on Ford's second-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Fields announced that the company plans to offer a battery-electric car with 200 miles of range.

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Fields was asked specifically whether Ford would join Chevrolet, Tesla, and other makers in offering a battery-electric car with a range of 200 miles or more.

“Clearly that’s something we’re developing for,” Fields said, according to industry trade Automotive News.

The company, he said, wants to be “among the leaders or in a leadership position” in electric cars as well as the segments in which it now competes.

The future electric car is likely to be dubbed the Ford Model E, and will arrive after a new generation of Ford Focus is launched for 2019.

That car's underpinnings are expected to spawn a dedicated vehicle that will be sold as a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, and an all-electric car.

It would likely replace both the current low-volume Ford Focus Electric compliance car and the hybrid and Energi plug-in hybrid versions of the current Ford C-Max.

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Before that time, however, the Ford Focus Electric will be updated to offer both 100 or more miles of range and the ability to use DC fast-charging stations to recharge its battery up to 80 percent of capacity in roughly 30 minutes.

That update will be launched later this year as the 2017 Focus Electric.

With the 2016 Nissan Leaf offering 107 miles of range, and battery updates coming for the BMW i3 and probably the Volkswagen e-Golf, 100 miles seems to be the new minimum range expectation among mass-priced battery-electric cars.