Finest, greenest, & safest taxicab in the world. The story of cab 2545

My money is on heat - perhaps not ambient heat, but the heat generated in the battery with the continued hard cycling of braking, accelerating, EV crawling in traffic, braking hard etc for 10 hours. A few years ago I documented on here about my car virtually switching the battery off and revving the engine at around 2500 rpm to power the a/c etc. It was suggested at the time that the battery had overheated and the car was attempting to protect it by using it less. That is in England where temps over 25c are quite rare. It can't be ambient temperatures, more internal heat.

I know cabs in America do the same rush hour crawling, but their roads are bigger and longer (before junctions and lights) than in Europe. I know when I quit taxiing and commuted to the nearest city, the 20 mile steady run even with heavy traffic at each end of the commute did the car the world of good. People base things on their experience. Americans get heavy traffic, I guess they even invented it, but it's not heavy traffic that's killing European gen3 Prii, its' the driving and the heat such driving generates.

A suburban area in America or Australia even, is well spaced out and designed for cars. In Europe with space at a premium and legacy road networks from hundreds of years ago, the car wouldn't even get out of 2nd gear if it were a manual before you have to brake and stop. You then set off again and stop 50 yards further away, repeat that work for 10 hours a day. Then add a passenger blocking the air vent to the battery with their suit of coat and you have a problem. Not after 20,000 miles, not after 50,000 miles, but 90,000 or more and things are going sour.

The gen2 had more margin built in and thus able to handle hard taxi use even here, but the gen3 seems to have been tuned more for its biggest market America where it excels, but appears to be a dud, at least in the longer term, in Europe. You'd have thought Toyota would tweak the car to last longer here as negative publicity from taxi failures could scupper their hybrid plans, yet they're planning on using li-ion packs here which apparently don't last as well as NiMH.

 

Maybe in general the Europe city and US city doesn't differ that much. But the press and general belief is that a hybrid is only better in heavy city traffic, if you are doing longer routes every one will take diesel. A Prius in Europe is bought for only one purpose heavy traffic it doesn't matter if it's for a taxi service or personal use, fact is a Europe Prius will see more battery cycling than US average Prius.

This can be seen from the data on spritmonitor (Europe's fuelly), average gen 3 Prius gets 46 MPG in Europe the fuelly data shows that average US Prius gets 48,3 MPG. This is not logical if you consider higher Europe's gas prices.

 

i dont know what to make of it either ! i just know that a whole bunch of gen 3's had their batts die on them some as short as 95-120000km you are correct about the gen 2 they are still running on the same batt. it has nothing to do with driving or heat patterns because some of these guys only run airport rides and still the batt conked out on them. Greece isn't att all hot nor humid nor cold it's a blessed place weather wise . i have a feeling that when they upped the cc's from 1500 to 1800 cc's they really didn't take in to account the stress on the batt believing that since the old batt did so great it would be good for the new model as well . and since the gen 3 is doing so great in the rest of the world it must be those damed Greeks doing some number on the rest of us prius enthusiasts ?

i am not saying that is what you say , but there are others that seem to enjoy the so called illiterate ones that are disappointed in the car they really loved to own and have being let down by it . why only in Greece ? i don't get it !

this week coming up is when they install the new batt on my cab . if they let me in on it i will try to snap pics of it and the new one to see what the !@!$$#! is up !

they got some toyota programmer coming in .

 

my average mpg when the car was new was 5.5 litters i drive at high speeds i don't care for savings on gas money i really bought the car for its transmission most of the others squeeze the hell out of the car to win on gas money ,high speeds ,low speeds ,highway ,city hot or cold... i can put my hand on the US constitution and the Greek one at that and swear that just about all the gen3's have had the same outcome with me . i cant swear by yours cause i am not a citizen of Slovenia . and neither by the bible for my beliefs and religion don't have one made up. except for a instructional poem or 2 written by this farmer/sheep herder named HESIOD . And he definitely had no intent for it to be sworn on for any reason and by any one body capable of dismembering the spirits in witch it was written !

 

you bought the car for it's transmission? what did you do with the rest of it? what did you want the transmission for?

 

i bought the car for it's transmission cause its known as one that doesn't brake down easy . as a major part it is a big expense to cover .... so what if its strong after all if i end up shoving money in to the car for a other major part more times than i projected? major parts go all the time but what the thing is how often they go that can make you or brake you .

 

I have been in those kind of conditions in Haiti and it is not seen anything like that in the US. granted I havent been in every big city. but I dont think that it is like that on a normal day in a taxi life here.

 

i have ridden in a hyhi and hycam in new york city, those guys are crazy. nothing could possibly be any harder on a car than that kind of driving. slam the gas pedal, go ten feet, slam the brake. all day long. i don't know how they hold up at all. seems to me you would need a specially built vehicle for that kind of driving.

 

But they're not failing and ours are. I've had expensive failures and I'm now getting a cycling battery and hesitation. Sure it's still running, but I'm now on the look out for a new car.

I still don't believe New York is anything on our traffic conditions however 'crazy' they drive. It's mad in New York but having googled it appears the average speed is 9 mph, compared to 1.5 mph average in my town. Might explain why Prii aren't failing in NY compared to NY (North Yorkshire). Maybe diesels aren't that bad for longevity?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/nyregion/24traffic.html?_r=0

Harrogate road among UK’s most congested - Harrogate Advertiser

 

i can't imagine what the air quality would be like in a city full of diesel cabs.

 

Dreadful, but at least they'd be going

I hope Toyota have picked up on some of these failures and are designing the gen4 to be as hardy as the gen2. Once word gets out the hybrid is a weak pup, sales will drop. It was always said that if taxis use them, then they must be good. If taxi drivers start moving away from them (for whatever reason), then word will get out. If Socrates is telling any passenger who asks what his experience of the Prius is, then that's a lot of lost future sales.

 

I think this is the key sentence and a key message to Toyota.

 

It's called the Ford Mondeo, the VW Passatt, the Peugeot 508, the TOYOTA Avensis. But maybe not the Toyota Prius.

 

i wonder how many cabs toy sells?

 

Quote a few though there appear to be local 'pockets' of different brands; usually depending on how good the respective dealer is. The Toyota Avensis Toyota Avensis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is popular in my area though is probably third to Ford and Skoda. The 100,000 mile warranty helps but Fords are usually cheaper and Toyota had 'issues' with their diesel engines. The Avensis starts at £16,500 and the Prius at £21,845 (don't even think of considering the £26,500 Prius+), though most taxi drivers buy 6 month old pre-registered or ex-demo cars for significant discounts. The Prius never seems to fall into that market.

When I bought my Prius they were priced about £1,500 over the Avensis and just about viable for me to get. Since then the Prius has been classed as a premium vehicle and the price has crept up, making it less and less viable compared to a diesel. I remember the discussions about fuel savings making up for the higher price 'I' paid back in 2009, making the Prius viable, but since then the cost of it has run away making it a good £5,000 more to buy. The maintenance savings the Prius was meant to save against the diesels haven't happened for either me or Socrates. £1,500 diesel particle filter failures are probably on a par with £1,500 inverter or £1,500 power steering failures in the Prius.

There are some tax benefits to running a Prius compared to a diesel if run as a taxi but they're a couple hundred pounds a year and a drop in the ocean. Diesel fuel economy has almost caught up with the Prius for similar sized vehicles, again pinching the Prius cost benefits.

The ONE benefit the Prius has over diesels is that its emissions are lower and to some cities that is important (thankfully). Unfortunately it appears Toyota have used that as a reason to keep prices high.

 

This has been the reality in Europe for decades (and the diesels weren't as clean 20 years ago).

 

when you buy a cab, is the purchase process different than for a regular person? is there a fleet deal or special requirements?

 

Depends. If it's a taxi company buying a fleet then good deals can be had, otherwise you buy the car just like a regular person (which is what most taxi drivers are).

There can be some 'special' finance deals for taxi drivers where you can pay for the vehicle weekly, though the rates overall are not that competitive. Useful to some I guess.

Oh and to show just how far out the Prius is now priced, you can get a Peugeot 5008 7 seater for £14,895 compared to the Prius t3 base at £21,845 or the Prius+ 7 seater at £26,500. That's a significant premium for the Prius!


New Peugeot 5008 (10 on) Car Review - Summary | Parkers


The reasons to have a Prius as a taxi were looking more difficult and now the reliability issues with the gen3. If I were in the market for a new car for use as a taxi, the Prius wouldn't be it I'm afraid. If money were no object I'd have the Prius+, but with it being £10,000 ($16,000) more expensive than the equally useable Peugoet, it's just never going to happen.

 

New York cycles *should* be worse for the car than yours. You just slowly move on old streets from light to light and never are able to get any speed. In NYC, it is like the old movies where they drag race between street lights, but every car does it. Pound the pedal to the floor until the last second and then brake as hard as you can without causing tire tracks. In a Prius that means you are drawing maximum current out of the pack for a short time, then jamming in a very short period of maximum regen too (with a very healthy dose of friction braking). This high current cycling must be worse than low speed "cycles" that just maintain between 1bar and 4 bars.