Fleet of automated electric taxis could deliver environmental and energy benefits
March 28, 2018, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
It may be only a matter of time before urban dwellers can hail a self-driving taxi, so researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley decided to analyze the cost, energy, and environmental implications of a fleet of self-driving electric vehicles operating in Manhattan.
Using models they built and data from more than 10 million taxi trips in New York City, they found that shared automated electric vehicles, or SAEVs, could get the job done at a lower cost - by an order of magnitude - than present-day taxis while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. What's more, they found that "range anxiety" is moot because smaller cars with a smaller battery range were sufficient to complete the trips, although more charging stations would be needed.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-fleet-automated-electric-taxis-environmental.html#jCp
