Originally Posted by Frank_Greve

In the case of hybrid garbage trucks, New York, Chicago, Houston and other big cities want them. Truck makers Peterbilt and Oshkosh are keen to build them. And the Environmental Protection Agency is promoting them as ideal platforms for hybrid technologies that work best on vehicles that stop and go a lot.

Garbage trucks are without peer in that department, according to Matt Stewart, the overseer of Chicago's fleet of 500. "You pull up, you idle, you stop, you load. You pull up and do it all over again." It adds up to 300 to 1,200 stops a day per vehicle. For a conventional diesel, 4 miles a gallon is decent mileage.

Most other hybrid trucks in the prototype and field-test stages do similar stop-and-go work. Delivery vans, for example, and shuttle buses are approaching production, . . .