NYC’s Taxi Fleet Going Green by 2012

Today the NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg sets out to turn the NY City Taxi fleet to green cars… meaning the ones that try to beat the high consumption of our platinum priced gasoline. In this quest they have added 400 additional hybrid taxi vehicles already… all new Ford Escape Hybrids. The whole plan is to have 1000 total of the new hybrids by October of 2008 and also by this date to require all cabs get 25mpg or better. Then to kick it up a notch by 2009 the requirement will be 30 mpg and to top off the deal by 2012 all taxies will be hybrid vehicles. The current “choice” taxi, the Ford Crown Victoria, gets about 15mpg in the city and the new Ford Escape Hybrid gets about 34mpg in the city. Hybrids take advantage of its super efficiency mainly for city driving by utilizing the electric motor in slow maneuvers and crawling traffic situations. While the 34mpg is great, some new hybrid taxi’s may see even better mpg figures than the EPA has estimated.  

Everyone is trying to beat these high gas prices, don’t you think?