Towncars…the greener people movers…

After an exhaustive search, Towncars selected the Ford G6E as its vehicle of choice – Ford’s top of the range passenger sedan. Motoring magazine drive.com says "the G6E is a good thing to drive with an excellent blend of steering feel, ride comfort and cornering grip".

In terms of safety, all G6E’s come with curtain airbags - one reason why the G6E is the first Australian built car to win the coveted Five Stars from the Australian New Car Assessment Program.

The G6E is also the foundation of Towncars ‘greener’ business model for personal transport. Five distinctive features make Towncars the ride of choice for those who want to reduce harmful emissions and support innovative and sustainable transport choices.

No Petrol Tank

When you open the boot of most taxis you find a large LPG tank. That's because the car was manufactured with a standard petrol engine and underwent a later gas conversion. Taxis typically operate by switching between gas and petrol over their working lives. Petrol exhaust is more particulate and emissions intensive than cleaner burning gas. Whatever mix of gas and petrol taxis achieve, the original effort to manufacture the petrol engine is a wasted carbon smudge when the petrol engine is not in use. The engine of conversion vehicles has to be tuned to operate on both petrol and gas, producing lower levels of burn efficiency on both fuels.

The G6E comes with a factory installed LPG power plant. The G6E doesn't have a petrol tank and is tuned exclusively to run on gas. The 6 cylinder LPG engine produces 240 grams of CO2 emissions per kilometre compared with up to 352 grams for a Holden Caprice V8. While the Sydney taxi fleet is mainly an LPG/petrol hybrid, the traditional Sydney hire car is petrol or diesel powered. Recent "eco friendly" hire car offerings have been limited to small hybrids that struggle to deliver passenger comfort. Towncars offers Sydney passengers a roomy, green LPG sedan fleet for the first time.

Benefits of Scale

The hire car industry is made up largely of sole owner operators - one of the reasons why most hire cars run at or below 15% productivity. This conventional business model is heavy with "dead running time" because individual operators spend so much time crisscrossing the city empty to pick up their next passenger.

Sydney's urban area covers 1687 square kilometres and the Sydney Statistical Division, used for Census data, covers a staggering 12,145 square kilometres. A single driver cannot service such a large city without lots of dead running time, which carries a contingent negative impact on our environment and air quality.

By building a centrally dispatched, large fleet of hire cars, the Towncars business model produces a much "greener" mode of passenger transport. The mathematics works in favour of the environment - the average distance between each Towncar and its next passenger reduces every time we add a vehicle to the fleet. Our exclusively pre-booked jobs also avoids the emissions and congestion impact of vehicles driving empty around the city looking for the next “hail”.

Territory Franchises

Customer service improvements and environmental benefits go hand in hand under Towncars unique franchise model. We have divided Sydney into territories by postcode with an individual driver and vehicle assigned to each territory. This has two results.

Firstly, repeat passengers see the familiar face of their "local driver" more often (which helps build relationships of trust and bespoke customer care).

Secondly, each car and driver develops a concentration of customers in one geographical area increasing the likelihood that the vehicle will be able to pick up a passenger returning to the franchise territory. Each vehicle’s directional record looks more like rifle bullets out of a barrel than shotgun pellets sprayed at random. Overall, that means lower emissions per passenger kilometre.

Smart Dispatch

Towncars' green advantage is enhanced by the application of route optimisation software to Australian hire cars for the first time. This powerful business tool, developed by over years of experience has the ability to instantly allocate fleet jobs to the "next nearest vehicle".

Every Towncar is fitted with a GPS device, so the software can automatically recognise and select the available Towncar that will be nearest to the pick up point at the time of passenger collection. The customer gets a faster service at lower cost, we reduce harmful emissions and our friendly drivers spend more time carrying passengers and less time hauling fresh air.