Long Island City, New York, is the home to the nation’s largest fortune cookie factory and to Silvercup Studios, where HBO filmed scenes of The Sopranos. This drab, industrial Queens neighborhood may be best known as the place you pass through to get onto the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan. Yet here, sharing a parking lot near the East River with 325 yellow New York taxicabs, are the 80 silver Toyota Prius sedans and five Lexus RX-400h SUVs of OZOcar—New York City’s first all-hybrid hired-car service.
There are more chauffeured cars and limousines (20,000) in New York than taxis (13,000), and OZOcar’s cofounders saw a business opportunity in the growing market sector of “eco-chic”—making the clean, ...
