New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Tuesday that the Big Apple has officially inked a $1 billion deal with Nissan to provide the city’s newest taxi vehicles. Based on the NV200 minivan, New York’s new Nissan taxis will allow more than 600,000 people to travel daily throughout the city, and Bloomberg claims that the minivans were selected based on passenger needs, as determined by surveys. The Japanese giant beat out Turkey’s Karsan Otomotiv and some other random car company. Oh wait, it was Ford that wanted to provide New York’s taxis. But don’t worry, Nissan will be producing the vehicles right in America’s back yard – Mexico.
It’s not all bad news for Ford, though. The American automaker had a great April, as sales and profits soared in Canada and the Mustang sold higher than expected in the U.S. Ford boasts the company’s new EcoBoost engines as the reason for recent success. The fuel-saving engines have had a huge impact on F-150 demand, too, with truck enthusiasts clamoring over the idea of not needing to sell a kidney to afford gas prices. Additionally, demand for the Taurus SHO has increased each month, and the same is expected for the EcoBoost Explorer and Edge models due out later this year.
Perhaps New York City could have pumped some money into the Wheego Electric Cars company, since the startup is having a tad, teeny weeny, little problem – it doesn’t have any money to produce cars. Wheego executives have been running their company on whatever money they can get their hands on, with the plan being to raise enough to produce 200 cars. After that, who knows? But they can’t even get that much to build their $33,000 electric cars. In fact, things are so bad that when someone in Germany ordered one of the custom cars, das government seized and destroyed it. Maybe give bicycles a try, guys.
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- Nissan wins $1 billion taxi cab contract for New York City over Ford. (News Max)
- Ford sales still rising with popularity of EcoBoost engines. (MSP News)
- Electric car startup Wheego having a tough time finding customers, spare change. (Green Car Reports)
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- Gary Faulkner has been trying to catch Osama Bin Laden for almost 10 years. And even though he didn’t catch him, he still believes that his efforts loosened the pickle jar, if you will. Therefore, by his bulletproof logic, he deserves part of the $25 million reward. (India Times)
- The U.S. Army will soon publicly unveil new “green” ammunition in Maryland, after using the bullets in the field for more than a year. These new small calibre rounds are lead-free, which means less damage to the environment after they blast through a terrorist’s eye socket. (Yahoo!)
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- Despite gas prices climbing toward a $5 per gallon national average, sales of two popular electric cars dropped between February and March. Chevrolet Volt sales declined 12% while Nissan Leaf sales dropped 23%. (Engadget)
- Ford predicts that by 2020, as much as 25% of the company’s sales will involve vehicles that depend on lithium batteries, while another 25% could be hybrids. Ford is on pace to be the first company to sell 100,000 lithium battery packs. (Clean Tech Blog)
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