Sanitation Dept. Unveils Hybrid Garbage Trucks

[Right Lane Cruiser]

Conventional garbage trucks cost $250,000 each, but these hybrids cost about $500,000 each.

Jennifer 8. Lee - BLOGS - August 25, 2009

There aren't much better applications for hybrid powertrains. --Ed.

Two years ago, the city’s Sanitation Department issued a challenge to the industry: hybrid garbage trucks.

“No one, until we asked, had entertained the thought of putting together a hybrid heavy-duty garbage collection truck,” said Vito A. Turso, a department spokesman.

This week the department announced that it would begin using the first of three such trucks, among the first in the country, in western Queens in September.

The vehicles — one from Mack Trucks and two from the Crane Carrier Company — are expected to use 30 percent less fuel than the current trucks do. The new ones look like the regular trucks but are slightly longer. They also advertise their environmentally friendly nature with green panels along the side. (Perhaps they could have taken a lesson in garbage truck art from Yonkers.) Four more trucks from Crane are also on order, for a total of seven.

The city’s 2,200 large garbage trucks haul more than 11,000 tons a day. “The problem, of course, is heavy-duty vehicles use a lot of gas,” Mr. Turso said. The department thought there was “an enormous opportunity to convert what is usually considered emissions-heavy collection trucks into something like these hybrids which reduce emissions dramatically.”

The trucks use two distinct types of technology. The Mack truck uses hybrid electric technology akin to... [Read More]

[Kacey Green]

Now if they teach the drivers they don't need to go WOT in between each stop, maybe just 1/4 throttle would be way more than 30%

Then 3 years later maybe just the 1/8th throttle necessary for the flat sections.