The first Ford Transit Connect people carriers have joined New York City’s taxi fleet. The first part of the order, after the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission’s approval, includes 400 Transit Connect Taxis painted in yellow and featuring the black “NYC Taxi” logo on their front doors.
The Transit Connect Taxi is already in service in other cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Orlando, Tampa and West Haven. Deliveries are approaching 1,000 units in the vehicle’s first year on the market, while the new taxi market in the US averages 6,000 units annually.
“Taxi operators are realizing the Transit Connect is a great vehicle and there’s a good reason they helped us develop it”, says Len Deluca, director of Ford’s Commercial Trucks. “During product development we visited cities across the US speaking with taxi owners, operators, drivers and city officials on the key attributes they wanted in a taxi.”
The standard edition is powered by a 2.0-liter four-cylinder gasoline engine with an average consumption of 22 mpg (10.7 lt/100 km) in the city and 27 mpg (8.7 lt/100 km) on the highway –an improvement of nearly 30% over conventional taxis.
The Transit Connect Taxi can also be converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied propane gas (LPG), which lower operating costs as well as fuel consumption and emissions.
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