YES!!!
One day I’m gonna drive that diesel/electric, I swear! 
Just need the local skills in SA, with papers, to do that … and the funds.
I’m reminded of something the late Frank Williams said when he was asked about an imminent engine deal for his F1 team: “Performance on a test bench is all very well, but things are a bit different when you put the engine into the back of an F1 car with a Keke Rosberg at the other end.”
He was talking about how the motor (Honda) was going to get treated in a very extreme way (and F1 has had it’s share of engines that went well in the laboratory but more resembled a hand grenade once sent into the real world of motor racing).
So that poor electric taxi is not going to be used exclusively on nice smooth roads with fast charging points available every couple of kilometres. And the driver won’t like having to take a smoke break when his vehicle needs charging.
But still, if I were a student and I had the funding, I’m sure I’d enjoy the research very much.
Necroing this a bit. Way way way back… 1998-ish if my memory is correct, there was a small team at the electrical engineering department working on an electric motor design for cars. They had a test vehicle, an old Ford Bantam if memory serves, something in the half-ton bracket, that had this mounted to the rear axle. I was lightly involved in helping two of the involved people in installing a popular unix variant on their personal computers, so that the modelling software could be run locally, instead of the shared unix server (which I think was SunOS at the time, later Solaris). The modelling software was written in Fortran, I think they used f77 or maybe already the GNU variant known as g77 at the time.