You’d Think Taxicabs Were Glamorous: Cold Start

I’m forever amused by advertising that tries to add glamor to things that just flat out don’t have it.

When considering retirement centers for my parents, I’ll open the glossy brochures to pictures of formal-looking spaces with attractive grey-haired people that don’t look a day over sixty dancing in formal attire. Having visited these places, I can assure you that the building and residents in it look nothing like this, and the brochures don’t mention the smell of fresh urine either.

The same is true for some workaday vehicles when it comes time to market them. If you’ve heard a car described as “taxicab basic” then you know that things purpose-built to be used in yellow-painted liveries are not exactly the flashiest objects to promote. This didn’t stop manufacturers from trying.

Back in the day brands like Dodge made such literature for even their most boring service-focused machines and tried to imbibe them with some sense of verve. You can see below how they’re showing these dull-ass sedans as an accessory of the jet set with Mr. Mad Men Guy in full-on suit, hat and raincoat at LAX:

I don’t know about you, but the poor “delegates” below getting out of the likely-six-cylinder-powered Dodge are going to go deaf from that frigging band with dueling tubas literally ten feet from their ear drums. “Welcome, sir!” “WHAT?”

Here’s another brochure with a very dated looking Matador cab and that same now-dated-looking nattily-attired business man from the earlier Dodge ad:

This man’s breed was really pretty much gone by then. At the time of this 1974 publication, a guy like that in real life would have looked out of place among the funktastic bell-bottomed travelers around him. Still, you gotta hand it to people that dressed sharp to board a plane, especially today when I get on flights with Modern Traveler Guy. You know the type: hoody over pajama pants, big-ass headphones clamping a backwards baseball cap, one of those fuzzy oversized C-shaped pillows around their neck, a sack of McDonalds, an enormous duffel bag, and his “personal item” is a backpack straining at its seams. Have they no shame? God, I sound like my mom.

Dodge kept going with this fleet market push, likely because their civilian car business was in the toilet. The cover car of the 1974 brochure below is one of the mid-sized Mopars that could also be seen getting totalled on the regular in The Dukes Of Hazzard or The A -Team. I had forgotten how nice looking these wallpaper Dodges of the seventies were, and pretty tough machines too.

Wait! No! Don’t buy this thing below! I know that cab buyers thought they were getting a new-and-improved version of the bulletproof Dodge Dart but listen to the voice from fifty years in the future! It’s a piece of crap! Most recalled car in history! I think later reworked examples were reasonably decent cars, but I’d still stay away, especially with that shallow-ass trunk.

These lavish-looking brochures for very non-lavish cars continued into the 2000s, if only in PDF form and not physically printed books. I know this because I found sales literature for our very own Nissan cab from a decade ago when it was, for about ten minutes, a clean and spanking new object and not the 375,000 mile shell of itself that it is now, plying across the country. Look how beautiful it looks in Nissan’s promotional images!

How about interior shots they did with the new cab? You could eat off those seats!

To be fair, you could eat off the floor of our current cab but you’d die.

Here’s a single-page sell sheet that’s kind of fun:

So going to a Nissan NV will get five acres of space back to Manhattan? Assuming that’s compared to a city full of beloved Crown Vic cabs? If so this “five acres” isn’t in a useable parcel that you could sell for tens of millions so it’s kind of deceiving. But did you notice this bullet point?

I do like that the cab has “germ fighting seats”! I mentioned this to Jason, who somberly informed me “the germs had won.” This might be true about that battle, but the war to reach California is still going strong! The “Cab of the Future” could still make it to LA, so you’d better stay tuned!