Electric Taxis Cannot Hack It On City Streets
Hopes of battery-powered taxis in New York were zapped after an electric cab couldn't hack the average taxi shift during a pilot program earlier this year.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission announced Thursday that the lithium battery-powered
PT Cruiser cab also couldn't withstand cold temperatures. The commission was testing whether the environmentally-friendly car could tough it out during the average, strenuous 10-hour New York cab shift.
The cab tested is different than the hybrid electric/gas vehicles that are already on city streets.
"It got to spend a lot of time on the back of a flatbed tow truck and not a lot of time as a taxicab," said commission spokesman Allan Fromberg.
Now it's back to the drawing board, but the commission has not given up and will keep on looking for an electric car that works. The little cab that couldn't hit the streets early this year, but usually stopped working after driving 40 miles, Fromberg said.
Once it made it more than 90 miles, but never the average cab shift of 100. The manufacturer, Hybrid Technologies, took the car back about a month ago, Fromberg said.
The company could not be reached Thursday. The commission and Mayor Michael Bloomberg committed to make taxis more environmentally sound earlier this year when they announced that the entire yellow cab fleet will go hybrid by 2012.
The commission Thursday also revealed a green-apple sticker that will mark the growing hybrid fleet that has now hit 461 out of more than 13,000 yellow cabs in service. A sticker for wheelchair-accessible cabs will also hit the streets soon.
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Electric taxis can't hack it on city streets - AM New York