White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Hail! New Cabs Are Coming

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When New York City was in a bad way, mostly from crime and grime, before the first Giuliani administration, the editor and social critic Lewis Lapham said: “First, fix the taxis.”

Quite so. Taxis are the public face of a city. In the United States, taxis are mostly a disgrace: dirty, poorly maintained and driven by people, often new arrivals, who do not know their way around.

It is not clear that New York fixed the taxis, but they seemed to improve along with a general improvement in street-level life in the Big Apple.

New York taxis are pretty special. An English writer in the 1960s described them with enthusiasm as “great yellow projectiles” hurtling down the Manhattan canyons. Next to London’s clumsy-looking but very nimble black boxes, there is a raw energy about New York taxis that mirrors the city they serve.

Yet there has been no distinctive vehicle for taxis since the Checker Motors Corporation of Kalamazoo, Mich., went out of business in 1982. Like other cities, the New York taxi fleet has become eclectic. The de facto standard vehicle has been the taxi version of the Ford Crown Victoria, utilitarian rather than distinctive, and now being discontinued by Ford.

The first victim of non-standard vehicles in taxi livery is comfort, especially in New York City, where operators install intrusive Plexiglas partitions to protect drivers. These make the back seat feel more crowded than it perhaps is, and cause the passengers to wonder about the safety of their noses in the event of a short stop.

For most people taxis are a luxury, something special. We want to feel special in the back seat, more like a person and less like a package.

Well nearly three decades after the last Checker went into service in New York, donned its yellow livery and had its prized medallion (the city-issued license that controls the number of cabs permitted to operate), New York is copying the London example—a vehicle built just for taxi work. Bravo.

According to The New York Daily News, four companies are competing for the honor of building purpose-specific taxi cabs: General Motors, Ford, Nissan and an obscure Turkish auto company, KarsanKarsan. The newspaper says the two top contenders are in fact Nissan and KarsanKarsan.

Reports give the advantage to the Turkish entry. Photographs of the Nissan suggest something built on the platform of a commercial van, whereas the Turkish offering is more elegant, after the style of a crossover. The issue is before the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Every few years, London has a competition for a new taxi model and these are sometimes built by companies not otherwise known for making cars.

London cabs have been regulated since the 17th century, when special designs for the horse-drawn contraptions were introduced and influenced carriage design around the world. They also led to some of the lore about London cabs. Cabbies, it is said, are obliged by law to carry a bale of hay for the horse; and it is legal for a gentleman to pee on the left rear wheel of the conveyance as necessary.

I have done many things in the back of a London cab, but I have never tested the left rear wheel. Also, I can attest that there is no trace of hay in or about today’s London taxi.

But there are things about London taxis that New York City, and by extension taxi operators across the United States, might wish to emulate:

—a. First, the roominess: Four people can comfortably ride in the back, two on the bench seat and two on fold-down seats facing backwards. This really is superior.

—b. Second, the roof height: In theory, this has to be high enough to accommodate a man wearing a top hat. The height of the man is not part of the legend.

—c. Third, the vehicle has to be able to turn almost in its own length. This, it is said, was introduced to accommodate the narrow circle in front of the Savoy Hotel, an Art Deco masterpiece.

If New York City gets new taxis, they will affect the whole country in time as did the Checker. After all, the original Checker market was not New York City but Chicago. Good ideas spread.

 

Batteries Are the Shocking Truth about Electric Cars

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Can white elephants come in green?

President Barack Obama flew to Holland, Mich., on Thursday to attend groundbreaking ceremonies for a new lithium-ion battery plant, which the White House advertised as an example of federal stimulus grants at work and a gateway to a clean-energy future.

Great stuff — if you don’t look too hard.

Indeed, the Holland plant, effusively hailed by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm as creating 300 jobs, and 62,000 “green” jobs down the road, will produce batteries in America.

But Compact Power Inc., which received $151 million from a federal stimulus program to open the $303 million plant, isn’t American and neither is its technology: It’s a subsidiary of the giant South Korean conglomerate LG Chem, and its technology is Asian.

Also that age-old bugaboo for electric cars — range and battery life — is still a work in progress. General Motors says its Chevy Volt will go up to 40 miles on a single charge and will have a range-extending, gasoline-assist feature. Nissan’s fully electric car, the Leaf, will have a 100-mile range. Ditto Ford’s electric Focus. Much depends on driving conditions.

Lithium-ion batteries are way ahead of traditional lead-acid batteries in power and weight, but they aren’t perfect. As yet, the best battery is far from being a competitor for a tank of gasoline.

There’s a back story here. The most obvious narrative is the need to create jobs in Michigan, and the hope is that electric vehicles will bolster car production there.

More obscure is the administration’s belief that a brave, new clean-energy America can produce jobs and reduce the output of greenhouse gases. In Obamaland, windmills will turn silently through the night, while millions of fully electric cars get their batteries topped up in driveways and garages.

A green and pleasant land is just a few million batteries away and, by Jove, the Department of Energy is on the job. It has $2.4 million to spend on electric car infrastructure. The department is helping to bring on nine battery plants, including the one in Holland. It’s also promoting charging stations.

Some small facts: These batteries are still so expensive (about $16,000 apiece) that any fully electric car, or near so, requires subsidies down the line to get the price down to where ordinary people will buy them in quantity. The only fully electric vehicle on the market today, the Tesla, is a sports car that costs over $100,000 and is aimed at the well-heeled greens of Hollywood.

While official retail prices for the Ford, Nissan and GM models haven’t been announced, estimates are in the range of $30,000 to $35,000. Federal tax credits are likely to trim several thousand dollars for many buyers.

Batteries have stood in the way of electric cars for more than a century. In the early days of motoring, electric cars covered short distances and held promise. But while internal combustion engines revved ahead, batteries languished.

But the dream of an electric car never died, though the batteries frequently did. In the 1970s, the U.S. government spent lavishly on battery research, including lithium and aluminum air batteries. There are dozens of ways to make batteries, but all have their disadvantages: weight, disposability, life, rate of discharge and market indifference.

If you want everything you get today on a car — electric windows, air conditioning, electric seats, multiple lights, highly variable loads and easy refueling and, maybe, towing capacity — you need a hell of a battery

We have, so to speak, been shocked by presidential energy enthusiasm before. Jimmy Carter believed in liquids from coal and launched the ill-fated Synthetic Fuels Corp., and George W. Bush went hog wild over ethanol — and those expectations are being trimmed daily.

I’ll buy a hybrid and wait, if it’s OK with Obama. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate