The owner of the taxi, John Swankie, is delighted with the conversion. Running costs have been greatly reduced compared to running on petrol, and are about 20 per cent less than running a similar-sized diesel taxi.

In addition to the low fuel costs, John's experiences of high servicing and repair prices of diesel-engined taxis persuaded him that Autogas was the way to go. It was also cheaper to purchase a petrol vehicle and have it converted, than to purchase a similar diesel powered vehicle.

 "Most of our customers drive large engined vehicles such as 4x4s, so it makes a nice change to convert something smaller. It confirms our thinking that high mileage drivers or those who keep their cars for a long time stand to save a lot of money by running on LPG.

"We are looking forward to converting more taxis and other business vehicles in 2010."

Most petrol engined vehicles can be converted to run on Autogas, giving a new lease of life to cars that are otherwise too expensive to run, and only require additional servicing and safety checks to the Autogas system every two years or 25,000 miles.

Autogas is cheap because the government charge relatively low tax on the fuel. This is to encourage drivers to use it in preference to petrol and diesel as it offers significant environmental benefits such as 20 per cent lower CO2 emissions than petrol, and 99 per cent lower particulate emissions than those produced by diesel engines