2008.04.18
Hybrid Limousine
Hybrid limo stretches mileage
Even in a small amount of over-the-top limousines, 28-foot-long dark Lincolns, and stretched out Hummers with not one but three cocktail bars in the back, this was a car that stood out from the crowd.
What made it one and only? An environmentally friendly hybrid engine that makes this livery-package Mercury Mariner available of getting 34 miles a gallon in the city, easily threefold the milage of a maxed out Hummer.
Many companies have begun proposing chauffeur-driven hybrid livery cars, among them PlanetTran in Cambridge and Go Green Airport Shuttle in Pelham, N.H., which both use Toyota Priuses. More than 300 hybrid taxis have left for service in New York and San Francisco since late 2005.
The Mariner, though, is the first manufacturer-sponsored hybrid made particularly for livery service. Painted in deep dark, with a particularized four-year, 100,000-mile guaranty and deluxe business-executive furnishings, the car sells for $30,200 in its front-wheel-drive version. Buyers can get a $3,000 federal energy-conservation tax credit.
"Our biggest challenge is the price of fuel, and if you compare the costs, this is a cheaper vehicle to run," said Roger J. Richard, president of Associated Cab Ltd. in Calgary, which runs a fleet of 425 taxis and 75 livery cars in the Western Canada energy-industry hub.
Associated uses eight hybrid Ford Escapes in the cab fleet and plans to add several of the Mercury Mariners, a more posh cousin of the Escape in size and styling.
"The next five years, there is going to be great changes in the industry," Richard added.
Doug Walczak, limousine and livery manager for Ford's North American fleet operations, said he and other Ford executives have been peppered with flooded of customers looking to subjoin hybrids to their fleet, including one Brooklyn limousine operator who was warned by a client that if he didn't add a hybrid to his fleet by New Year's Day, they'd leave him.
"A lot of operators voiced, 'What are we going to do to percept to the green market? What are we doing to meet the environmental movement?'" - Walczak said.
The EPA estimates the Mariner at 34 miles per gallon in city driving, 30 on the highway, compared with 15 in city and 23 on the highway for the industry-standard Lincoln Town Car set with an extra 6-inches of rear-seat legroom. In relation on weight, made-to-order extended Hummers and Cadillac Escalades able to give single-digit mileage.
In spicy difference to gasoline-only vehicles, which ordinarily are well over fuel-efficient on the highway, hybrids do better in stop-and-go city driving, when they can operate all-electric at slow speeds and have batteries frequently recharged as the brakes are used, due to the new technology known as regenerative braking.
Such companies as PlanetTran, which enlarged from Boston and Cambridge to also serve the San Francisco Bay area, showed there's a clear market for environmentally tended chauffeured-car customers ready to pay $60 an hour and stuff themselves in the back seat of a Prius.
New York hybrid limo operator OzoCar, which operates a fleet of Priuses and Lexus Rx400h hybrids, and Executive Transportation Group, which runs 17 metropolitan New York black car fleets, plan to roll out franchised hybrid-car limousine services in six to eight more US cities.
Roger Hamelin, owner of Prospect Limo Service LLC in Prospect, Conn., who runs a fleet of five cars, said he'd be leery of offering service in a Prius.
"I would not do that because of the luggage space," Hamelin said.
About the Mariner, Hamelin said he liked what he saw, but noted, "I'm hoping they would be able to come in sooner or later with a Town Car hybrid version. That's the real standard in this business, and people want to be green. People likely to boast, 'I'm using a green car for my limo.'"
