New York Selects Nissan NV as Taxi of the Future – Gas 2.0 New York City has held a contest of sorts to determine what will be the city’s future taxi. After going to the public and taxi cab owners, the city settled on the one design nobody else liked, the Nissan NV. That sounds harsh, and I know Nissan makes a fine product. However, when New York City officials asked the public to pick a design, people drifted towards the Turkish-built Karsan taxi design (which I’m not sure exists save on paper.) The Karsan was also popular with advocates for the handicapped, as it offered dual mechanical ramps for ease of accent for the handicapable. The taxi cab owners and operators, meanwhile, preferred the Ford Transit Connect, having been using Ford Crown Victoria’s  en masse for the last four decades or so. If you want a durable vehicle, look no further than the Crown Vic. So it is only natural that NYC officials settled on the Nissan NV200, the third and final candidate. Nissan won out based on comparisons like interior leg and headroom, durability, safety and other factors, though how does one judge the durability of a vehicle that isn’t even sold in America? Karsan had said it might build the cabs right in Brooklyn, and while Ford’s Transit Connect comes all the way from Turkey, it can be outfitted as a Taxi cab, right now, with a natural-gas engine (and Ford has already announced an EV version coming in a few months time. Nissan is supposedly working on an EV version of the NV200, and by the time these Taxis of Tomorrow hit the road in 2013, there might be an effective EV version in the stable. Maybe not. Either way, the NV200 will be built in Mexico, not America. Boo.

New York Selects Nissan NV as Taxi of the Future – Gas 2.0

New York City has held a contest of sorts to determine what will be the city’s future taxi. After going to the public and taxi cab owners, the city settled on the one design nobody else liked, the Nissan NV.

That sounds harsh, and I know Nissan makes a fine product. However, when New York City officials asked the public to pick a design, people drifted towards the Turkish-built Karsan taxi design (which I’m not sure exists save on paper.) The Karsan was also popular with advocates for the handicapped, as it offered dual mechanical ramps for ease of accent for the handicapable.

The taxi cab owners and operators, meanwhile, preferred the Ford Transit Connect, having been using Ford Crown Victoria’s  en masse for the last four decades or so. If you want a durable vehicle, look no further than the Crown Vic. So it is only natural that NYC officials settled on the Nissan NV200, the third and final candidate. Nissan won out based on comparisons like interior leg and headroom, durability, safety and other factors, though how does one judge the durability of a vehicle that isn’t even sold in America?

Karsan had said it might build the cabs right in Brooklyn, and while Ford’s Transit Connect comes all the way from Turkey, it can be outfitted as a Taxi cab, right now, with a natural-gas engine (and Ford has already announced an EV version coming in a few months time. Nissan is supposedly working on an EV version of the NV200, and by the time these Taxis of Tomorrow hit the road in 2013, there might be an effective EV version in the stable. Maybe not. Either way, the NV200 will be built in Mexico, not America. Boo.

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smarterplanet: Data Show Best Corners to Hail a Cab in New York - NYTimes.com The information, collected by GPS, can be used to create helpful tie-ins for customers, like a new smartphone program that lets mobile users locate the ideal nearby corner to hail a cab … Using the city’s GPS data, Sense Networks, a SoHo software analytics firm, examined the pickup point of every New York City cab ride taken in the first six months of 2009. The result was a free mobile application called CabSense, which was released this week for iPhones and Android phones. 

smarterplanet:

Data Show Best Corners to Hail a Cab in New York - NYTimes.com

The information, collected by GPS, can be used to create helpful tie-ins for customers, like a new smartphone program that lets mobile users locate the ideal nearby corner to hail a cab … Using the city’s GPS data, Sense Networks, a SoHo software analytics firm, examined the pickup point of every New York City cab ride taken in the first six months of 2009. The result was a free mobile application called CabSense, which was released this week for iPhones and Android phones. 

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