In a town where City Hall’s roof is a garden and green is considered good, the city has signed an $8.7 million contract to buy as many as 300 Toyota hybrid vehicles that use electric power and plans to buy the first Chicago police cars ever to run on alternative fuel.
Mayor Richard Daley is even eyeing the possibility of trading in his eight-cylinder luxury sedan for a more environmentally friendly ride.
Daley, who is driven to appointments and appearances in a Lincoln Town car, “has expressed interest” in an alternative fuel replacement, “but we still have to do the research,” spokeswoman Kate Sansone said.
Acquisition of the new hybrids is part of an initiative, begun several years ago, to replace gas guzzlers with more fuel efficient and less polluting cars in the city’s 5,400-auto fleet.
Under the new contract, winning bidder Northside Toyota will deliver as many as 100 Prius sedans, 100 Camry models and 100 Highlander sport-utility vehicles during the next three years, with the potential of more than doubling the city’s existing hybrid inventory. The city’s fleet currently includes 57 Priuses and about 180 hybrid Ford Escape SUVs.
When the first alternative fuel sedan certified for police use goes into production next year, the city intends to buy 300 of them, said Eileen Joyce, a spokeswoman for the city’s Fleet Management Department. Some will go to the Police Department, and some to the Fire Department. The cars will run on E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
The goal is to increase the number of environmentally friendly cars by 10 percent each year, Joyce said.
“The market has changed so much in the past five years that it has made [alternative fuel cars] much more economically viable,” said city Environment Commissioner Suzanne Malec-McKenna, who owns a 2004 Prius. “Much more functional vehicles have come on the market.”
Acquisition of the new cars also “sends an excellent message, not [only] to fellow employees but to businesses and residents of Chicago,” Malec-McKenna said.
Cities across the country are adding new-generation vehicles to their fleets, and government and corporate fleets represent “the real growth area for hybrids,” said Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, who has studied the alternative fuel vehicle market. “Consumers are buying, but better than a quarter of all hybrids being sold are either for commercial or government use.”
Results have not been uniform, Spinella said.
“If the Prius is used in urban Chicago for the most part on battery power [at low speeds] rather than gasoline power [at higher speeds], then it’s a positive thing both ecologically and in terms of cost,” he said. Use of the hybrid SUV, however, “is a different issue.”
“It’s not all that terribly efficient. It’s an expensive vehicle to maintain. The city probably will end up having a higher cost than the vehicles they are replacing, and you do very little [reducing] the carbon footprint. … It makes a nice statement, but that’s about all it does.”
If expense rather that ecological impact and image ends up ruling the day, he thinks that fleet purchases of the new generation vehicles “is headed for a crash.”
Bill Reinart, Toyota’s advanced technology group national manager, begs to differ.
The cars can cover some of the higher purchase prices with fuel savings, especially as gas prices increase, and “these cars stand up to fleet use,” Reinart asserted. Spinella may believe that “hybrids are less robust than traditional vehicles [but] I don’t think anybody has any evidence that has been the case.”
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gwashburn@tribune.com
