Taxis of the Future Soon to Hit New York Streets

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has announced the three finalists for the vehicle they will choose to replace New York's aging taxi fleet. The winning cab will replace a large chunk of over 13,000 cabs that traverse the city. Whichever design is chosen will have a major impact on which green fleet technologies get adopted - New York has the largest taxi market in the US - and which don't.

These are the criteria that will determine the winning bid:

• Meets highest safety standards
• Superior passenger experience
• Superior driver comfort and amenities
• Appropriate purchase price and ongoing maintenance and repair costs
• Smaller environmental footprint (lower emissions and improved fuel economy)
• Smaller physical footprint (with more usable interior room)
• Compliance with appropriate Americans with Disabilities Act requirements
• Iconic design that will identify the new taxi with New York City

It will be especially interesting to see how the winning cab stacks up, in terms of fuel efficiency, with the city's current crop of hybrid-electric cabs, or Chicago's CNG (compressed natural gas) cabs that I wrote about here. This is to say nothing of San Francisco's Japanese-made all-electric cabs that received a huge federal grant earlier this year. 

Here are the finalists:

Turkish automaker Karsan's entry, the only cab that is wheelchair-accessible

Ford Transit Connect Taxi

Nissan's finalist


Via: Planetizen

SF Taxi Cabs the First Wave of EV Revolution in the Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area has been at the forefront of the electric vehicle (EV) innovation wave that has gotten major venture capitalists involved on an unprecedented scale. Back in May, I wrote about the SF-based firm Better Place and their (well-funded) project to bring $1.4 billion of investment to create a neighborhood level electric charging station network state-wide. There's also an established "electric highway" of EV charging stations on Hwy. 101 designed to service exclusively the Tesla Roadster, however limited that project may be in scope.

One of the first, and most highly visible, manifestations of the EV revolution in San Francisco will come in the form of a fully-electric fleet of taxi cabs throughout the city, funded by the US Dept. of Transportation. Over the next three years, four battery charging stations will be placed across the city. These stations will swap the taxi's batteries in as little as 45 seconds. To be practical for wide application, the charging stations must be efficient and lightning-quick; no taxi cab company in its right mind would let its vehicles sit idle for hours charging under the dominant EV charger technology in place in most cities today.

The project is a replication of an earlier system Better Place executed in Tokyo, using one of that megacity's largest taxi cab companies, Nihon Kotsu. The taxicabs in that experimental project drove over 25,000 miles using fully electric power from the Better Place charging stations.

This remarkable project implementation from Better Place is just one more reason why Inhabitat calls San Francisco "set to lead the electric vehicle revolution."

Via: Inhabitat

Chicago to Follow NYC in Embracing "Green" Practices for Taxi Cabs

The oldest and largest cab fleet in North America, Yellow Cab Chicago, has recently announced a 10-year contract with Clean Energy Fuels to provide two compressed natural gas (CNG) filling stations in the city to power its taxi cabs. These filling stations will also be available to the public. 


Chicago is not the first American city to use CNG taxi cabs, but it is by far the largest and most influential to do so. The timing of this partnership comes as a result of a $1.5 million dollar grant package from the City of Chicago and the US Department of Energy (through the Clean Cities Coalition program). 


The City of Chicago is convinced that the CNG taxi cab program will both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save cab operators money, according to a story posted to Inhabitat:

CNG isn’t a zero emission technology, but according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it emits 80 percent fewer ozone precursors and over 95 percent fewer particulates than conventional gasoline-powered vehicles. In addition to being cleaner, compressed natural gas is also 30 to 40 percent cheaper than gasoline or diesel on a mileage basis.

Although these estimates of emissions and cost reductions may be accurate, it is important to analyze new investments in alternative fuel technology from a life cycle analysis perspective. In short, this new CNG taxi cab partnership should be assessed based on whether its total aggregate emissions from every stage of its operations - construction of the filling stations, station maintenance, fuel production, procurement, and logistics, purchase of new CNG-compatible cabs, and the increased distances cabs must travel to fuel up - constitute a significant reduction from conventional petroleum fuel emissions. The City of Seattle recently suspended its own 1992 experiment with CNG vehicles for this very reason: the predicted emissions reductions did not materialize when the life cycle costs were factored in.