UMAS in Malmö focus on clean vehicles
Within CIVITAS SMILE the University hospital in Malmö, UMAS has changed half of their vehicle fleet to clean vehicles. Stefan Sjöholm works as a janitor at UMAS and drives one of the first natural gas vehicles at the hospital and has only good experiences to report: “It has worked out very well, it’s actually no different to an ordinary car.”
The UMAS Transport Services has 2 electric cars, 4 ethanol cars and most recently a natural gas driven car, a Volkswagen Caddy. Within CIVITAS SMILE support has been provided to purchase natural gas vehicles. The extra cost for buying a natural gas vehicle is about 30 000 Swedish crowns (3000€). “Today ethanol vehicles are not much more expensive than ordinary vehicles”, says Göran Ericsson from UMAS Transport Services. UMAS do not own the vehicles, they are leased from Handelsbanken and there have been no problems leasing clean vehicles. The natural gas powered mini-lorry will help Stefan Sjöholm carry out his work with maintenance at UMAS buildings and facilities. The natural gas vehicle has the same acceleration and speed as a regular car and Stefan reports “The only difference really is an odd sound when you start the car, but it runs perfectly. Filling the car with natural and biogas in Malmö is not a problem as the energy company E.ON has several gas filling stations. The big difference is that cars running on biogas do not add any extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and there are also economic benefits. We save some money, and we get a cleaner environment.”
