Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Ford Motor Co., alone among U.S. automakers in forgoing federal aid to stay in business, plans to “keep going on our own,” Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. said.

The second-biggest U.S. automaker will ask for government loans only if “the world implodes as we know it,” Bill Ford told reporters today at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

His comments affirmed Ford’s strategy of relying on $23 billion in borrowing from late 2006, not U.S. assistance, to weather losses while shutting plants and adding new models. General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC got $4 billion each after saying they might be out of operating cash by this month.

Ford has gross cash of less than $15 billion, Chief Financial Officer Lewis Booth told reporters. The fourth-quarter cash burn was smaller than in the previous three months, when Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford used up $7.7 billion, Booth said.

Ford showed off its revamped Taurus, a priority for Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally, as a flagship vehicle and also unveiled a plan to develop a battery-powered auto with Canadian partsmaker Magna International Inc. by 2011.

Ford’s Electric Auto

The announcement puts Ford back into the race with GM and Toyota Motor Corp. to build an all-electric car after the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker said as recently as June that it would only invest in developing such a vehicle if there was proven public demand.

“If customers aren’t buying them, we’re not making them,” Ted Miller, Ford’s senior manager of energy storage, said in an interview June 27.

The new recharged vehicle likely will be similar in size to the Ford Focus, will use lithium-ion batteries and have a range of as much as 100 miles, Derrick Kuzak, Ford’s chief of global product development, said today at the Detroit show.

Cars outsold trucks in the U.S. last year for the first time since 2000. The Taurus and electric compact would further Mulally’s strategy of emphasizing small cars over the full-size pickups and sport-utility vehicles that accounted for most of Ford’s profits in the 1990s. The Taurus was the best-selling car in the U.S. in the early 1990s.

“It might not be the volume leader, but it certainly is the halo product” for the Ford brand, spokeswoman Marisa Bradley said of the redesigned Taurus.

To contact the reporters responsible for this story: Keith Naughton in Detroit at knaughton3@bloomberg.net; Hugo Miller in Detroit on hugomiller@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: January 11, 2009 14:27 EST