Fifth Gear: Hydrogen black cabs take to London's roads

...and what do cabs and busses use right now? Yup.
I wasn't disagreeing with you I was simply stating that while long haul trucks are generally more efficient in their use of fuel I would still put them right behind the urban public transport for swapping power plants to 0 emissions specifically because of the use of diesel.
Only NY US taxis run on petrol.
FTFY :p

Not sure how other places have it but we have a very large number of hybrid buses here though I'm not sure if they use diesel just to produce electricity or if its a tandem. I suspect the latter as they have big ass batteries on the roof.
 
FTFY :p

Not sure how other places have it

Busses tend to be Merc diesels, a traditional cab is - big surprise - also a Merc diesel. Recently other manufacturers became more popular as cabs, but all of them diesels obviously. This has become so bad now that I once had to take the last cab remaining at the train station at 2am ... good news, it was a Dacia. Made me make a mental note to never consider thinking about playing with the idea of looking at a Dacia for myself.


PS: The NYC Merc Orion buses are Diesel-LiIon series hybrids. Their press release said running the diesels at a constant speed avoids the typical cloud of smoke when setting off ... duh, it just distributes said cloud evenly :lol:
 
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Busses tend to be Merc diesels, a traditional cab is - big surprise - also a Merc diesel. Recently other manufacturers became more popular as cabs, but all of them diesels obviously. This has become so bad now that I once had to take the last cab remaining at the train station at 2am ... good news, it was a Dacia. Made me make a mental note to never consider thinking about playing with the idea of looking at a Dacia for myself.
Hehe, so you don't run hybrid buses over there at all?
 
We have one (1) here (G?teborg) because obviously Volvo made one and wanted to test it. Norwegians f*cking loves hybrids though. Well, at they have more than one. They have 14.

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Scania have made one that was supposedly trialed in Stockholm but I don't think it's gotten any further.
It looks ugly but it's pretty clever.

This is of course one way of doing it altough it's not really a bus anymore...
 
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This is of course one way of doing it altough it's not really a bus anymore...
Well IDK back in the home country they called it a trolleyBUS so it counts :) Funnily enough Russian trolleys never had battery back up, so they got stuck at intersections if they couldn't roll through on momentum. I only seen them used in Seattle though nowhere else in the US (then again I haven't visited enough of the US to be a good source).
 
Well IDK back in the home country they called it a trolleyBUS so it counts :) Funnily enough Russian trolleys never had battery back up, so they got stuck at intersections if they couldn't roll through on momentum. I only seen them used in Seattle though nowhere else in the US (then again I haven't visited enough of the US to be a good source).

FWIW, cable cars are still (correct me if I'm wrong, only been there once) pretty widely used in SF and are (I think) powered by electricity coming down from the wire.
 
They have them around Boston too. Weirdly, some of them also have a diesel engine in the back, as they run on routes that are only partially electrified. The driver has to stop the bus and get out to make the transition from diesel to electric power.
 
FWIW, cable cars are still (correct me if I'm wrong, only been there once) pretty widely used in SF and are (I think) powered by electricity coming down from the wire.

Well cable cars are more like trams than anything else.
They have them around Boston too. Weirdly, some of them also have a diesel engine in the back, as they run on routes that are only partially electrified. The driver has to stop the bus and get out to make the transition from diesel to electric power.
Really? I don't remember seeing any there. Then again I hate Boston and blocked out most of my memories.
 
Really? I don't remember seeing any there. Then again I hate Boston and blocked out most of my memories.

Typical New Yorker :p. They're on the Silver Line that connects the main subway network to the airport.
 
I don't know of any, but then I don't live in London. I would say that they should definitely use this as a big push to introduce much more Hydrogen to the city; more cabs would be great PR and would demand many more fuelling stations. Opening small single pump ones across London could have great potential as long as cars are made easily available.

This is excellent anyway; good to see authorities pushing forward with this sort of stuff rather than telling everyone to do it themselves. :)

question though, when theres lots of hydrogen stations around and all our cars are running around producing nothing but H20, what are the government going to tax? road tax may remain but they wont be able to base it on the amount of pollution you make, and if they tax hydrogen fuel.... then that might make the cost too much because surely getting hydrogen into a form you can use has got to be more expensive than drilling black stuff out the ground.
 
FWIW, cable cars are still (correct me if I'm wrong, only been there once) pretty widely used in SF and are (I think) powered by electricity coming down from the wire.

San Francisco has plenty of electric buses (the wires continue through the intersections, so they can't get stuck), and the cable cars are physically pulled by the cables. The only electricity involved is in the underground motors turning the cables at the end of the routes.
 
Typical New Yorker :p. They're on the Silver Line that connects the main subway network to the airport.

Ahh OK, I was driving most of the time there. Cept for one time my friend made me go on what passes for a subway over there and I wanted to drown her in the bay afterwards :p
question though, when theres lots of hydrogen stations around and all our cars are running around producing nothing but H20, what are the government going to tax? road tax may remain but they wont be able to base it on the amount of pollution you make, and if they tax hydrogen fuel.... then that might make the cost too much because surely getting hydrogen into a form you can use has got to be more expensive than drilling black stuff out the ground.
There is no separate car tax in my state at the moment. You pay for fuel and you pay for registration (once every two years) and annual safety inspection thats it. AFAIK MA has what's called a luxury tax and there its based on the price+age of the car. IIRC you pay less every year you own the same car because of depreciation Labcoatguy can weigh in on that as my info could be outdated.

They can still tax the fuel at a different rate no matter how you get it.
 
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AFAIK MA has what's called a luxury tax and there its based on the price+age of the car. IIRC you pay less every year you own the same car because of depreciation Labcoatguy can weigh in on that as my info could be outdated.

Yup, they have excise taxes on cars here at both the state and local level based on the value of the car; yet another reason why I'm sticking to depreciated used cars for quite some time.
 
Brilliant. Hydrogen cars are the future! :)

That is my opinion too. Living in Iceland, electric cars are never going to work here as a replacement for fossil fueled vehicles. Cold is not kind to batteries. In the colder regions of the planet, i think methane and hydrogen will qonquer. We already have buses running on methane gas just fine and more and more hydrogen cars are imported each year.
 
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