Limo Board Bashes Hybrid Escape Taxis

Cites Rollover Danger As Main Reason Opposing New Taxis

A New York tradition is to hail a bright yellow cab and have the cabbie take you to where you want to go around the Big Apple. New Ford Escape Hybrid cabs offer fuel savings, but are they safe? A New York City limousine board argues that they are not.

New York City has tens of thousands of taxis plying the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island at any given time. New Yorkers, commuters, and tourists rely upon taxis to transport themselves to different parts of the city in these bright yellow cabs.

For many years the Ford Crown Victoria was the vehicle of choice for cabbies, but pressure from the mayor’s office to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is forcing owners to choose hybrids, particularly the Ford Escape Hybrid as their taxi of choice.

A recent crash in the city involving a Ford Escape Hybrid saw the vehicle roll over, occupants severely injured, and the car destroyed. That incident, along with two others, has led to the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade to investigate the Escape where they found that the hybrid has only a three-star rollover rating while the Crown Victoria has the industry’s highest with five stars.

“In all my work as an accident reconstruction expert over the past 26 years, I cannot recall a single case where a Crown Victoria or a Crown Victoria-like vehicle has rolled over in a vehicle-to-vehicle crash,” said C. Bruce Gambardella, P.E. before the New York City Council on June 3, 2008. In a comprehensive report on hybrid taxi safety issued last month, he noted that, “the Ford Escape Hybrid is more likely to roll over than the Ford Crown Victoria” and attributed the problem to the Escape’s “high C.G. (Center of Gravity) and relatively high seat positions” and he also noted that due to “far from perfect” New York City streets, “discontinuities in the road surface will help to trip SUV-type vehicles and increase the potential for rollover.”

The Board of Trade also determined that if a Crown Victoria was involved in the rollover accident instead of the Escape, it wouldn’t have rolled over. Moreover, the commission concluded that the accident would have been a simple fender bender for the bigger and wider Crown Victoria.

The report found several other safety hazards, many of which can be attributed to the unintended use of the Ford Escape Hybrid — a standard passenger vehicle — as a New York City taxicab. In analyzing the rollover accident, Mr. Gambardella found that:

• The side-curtain airbag did not deploy normally due to insufficient space between the partition and the top of the car.

• The L-shaped partition interfered with the 3-point unibelt because it changed the anchoring position of the belt.

• The partition did not stay in place during the crash and may have resulted in a violent head strike against the hard partition if there had been a passenger in the right front seat.

The limo board has brought a federal lawsuit against the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) and the City of New York to stop its 25/30 mpg taxi mandate, which would force owners to abandon purpose-built stretch Crown Victorias and purchase Ford Escape Hybrids and other untested and unproven standard non-commercial passenger vehicles and place them into service as taxicabs. The mandate, which was set to take effect on October 1st, 2008 has been delayed because of the ongoing court case. Arguments were to be heard in Manhattan federal court on this past Friday.

(Source: Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade)