Nimh is NOT good for putting cells in parallel. I don't know what the capacity of the Ford cells are, but likely much less than 200Ahr.
The problem is when Nimh cells reach full charge, the cell voltage drops slightly. This causes the first cell group to get full to start hogging all the current and can even pull current from the other cells in parallel. This results in overheating and possible fire.
There are ways around this, but they are all cumbersome. It would be much better to find some LiFePO4 cells, which play nice when put in parallel. I have some modules that came from a Fisker, that all had one or two bad cells. These were very inexpensive since they were bad. I bypassed the bad cells with a heavy jumper and the remaining cells work fine.
Another alternative are used Nissan Leaf cells, which are fairly inexpensive and pretty easy to find.