At this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show, Ford Motor will present the 2010 Ford Fusion and its Mercury counterpart, the Milan. They will get new aerodynamic front and rear sheet metal, more powerful and more efficient engines, six-speed automatic and manual transmissions and vastly improved interior as Ford aims at the top-selling Toyota Camry and Honda Accord.

Furthermore, Ford will also introduce a revamped Mustang at the California show, designed to compete with the Chevrolet Camaro and the Dodge Challenger.

Ford has gone ahead with its scheduled model releases, rolling out new hybrid gas-electric versions of both the Fusion and Milan, stating that the models will get 39 miles per gallon in the city. The base model Fusion will get 33 miles per gallon on the highway, beating comparable 2008 versions of the Accord and Camry by 2 miles per gallon.

Ford’s approach comes as the world has changed and gasoline has spiked toward $4 per gallon and truck and SUV sales tumbled as people switched to cars. In the mid-1990s and into the current decade, Ford focused mainly on trucks and sport utility vehicles when gasoline was cheap, neglecting its car lineup to the point where its small offering, the Focus, received little attention for 8 years.

Ford has also announced its plans to bring a family of small cars to the U.S. from Europe in 2010. In addition, the company has increased production of the Focus and it’s hoping that the Fusion, Milan and MKZ will be successful until the new cars arrive. This year, Toyota sold 386,000 Camrys in the United States, Honda sold 333,000 Accords, while Ford sold only 128,000 Fusions.

A price tag has yet to be released, but it seems that the cars’ price will be higher than the current Fusion’s base of $18,135 because of the new upgrades and features. The hybrid gas-electric cars, which are built in Mexico, are expected to arrive in showrooms in March 2009.