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!
Should have pre-treated them with Slazol…
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibYTmiM1A3ZIdQ1n875C-qww8irnTkqXOAYy08jwZsDCVBb0HfEYDLavzl-Y_pobPnRbh6o0nHsFlceoSTyQYD7e3uJwXjOnV8r0BU5SnbyrQhL5WumLp5L_i4Gj0SD1N-fvez5TtdEWM/s1600/natlamp+paper+parody+012.jpg
I think you mean “imbue“. Imbibe is what the Mad Men copywriters did with their Scotch immediately after wowing the clients with the brochures for these yellow turds.
I have never seen a man wearing a raincoat in real life LA, and in the movies, men wearing raincoats in LA only wear them to conceal shotguns or automatic rifles.
Urine smells at retirement centers are actually about as rare as Caravelles at LAX.
“Germ fighting seats” Ha ha
“The germs have won”
Ain’t that the truth!
Why is Clark Kent taking a taxi? Why is Clark Kent taking a plane? How did I go my whole life without jumping in a taxi and yelling, “Follow that cab!” I’ll take a fedora over a baseball cap any day.
One of my favourite podcasts is 99% Invisible, hosted by the hilariously and brilliantly named Roman Mars. The premise of the podcast is to explore the design of everyday objects and environments. The stuff we take for granted and don’t give much thought to. Like why are traffic lights laid out the way they are? Livery vehicles fit this category in my mind, so this is a compelling read for me.
Can you do a series on ice cream trucks? How about the crew buy an ice cream truck in California and drive it back out east for their return trip? I assume they will be selling the cab there since it will be worth so much money in SoCal. LOL
They would have to leave the jingle playing all the way.
I am a person who will drive 12 hours versus flying in pretty much any case. But the times that I have flown in the past, it would usually be in a suit as I didn’t want to pack that away and get all wrinkled for where I needed to be. But with that, I usually had a stuffed duffle bag and a full backpack as I didn’t want to have to wait for checked baggage.
Writing about taxis today doesn’t do anything to debunk that “The Bishop is Jason’s alt” conspiracy theory…
No, it doesn’t, does it?
I bathe and put on clean clothes before heading to the airport, but I can’t imagine trying to wrangle my luggage (or, if it’s vacation, the addition of my mom and her bottle of Dramamine and her luggage) while wearing a cute, dressy outfit and ‘nice’ shoes. And that’s not even including security. Nope, I’m wearing comfy (but supportive) slip-on shoes, a t-shirt, and cargo shorts or pants.
Get TSA PreCheck and you won’t have to take your shoes off, undress, or take the Ziploc bag of liquids out of your carry-on.
Used to take taxis a lot back in the 90’s. Mostly Aslares, Volpens, Towncraps and Crownvics. All disgusting crab driving, rattling, junk food, incense and dollar store eau du toilet crap cans. The city forced most off them off the road in the late 90’s early 20’s. The mostly modern replacement fleet was fine excepting the sticky odors.
Don’t miss those years much.
My Gramps (an Oldsmobile guy) was a tool & die man at Chicago Faucet. He didn’t shave on the weekends, watching the Cubs on WGN in his recliner, but when he flew (Vegas, natch), he wore a suit & hat, sharp as a tack.
Chicago Faucet/Geberit! I make their showroom displays.
I used to sell them when I worked in the showroom of a K&B wholesaler in CT. I was pretty fond of the Geberit turn control tub overflow/drain. No little lever to lift up and down to fill the tub
!!! That’s amazing.
“Lasts as long as the building.” When I was a kid, we’d take the shower heads with us when we moved. And when I bought a house, 24 years ago, it was the very tail end of their consumer business, so that’s what we have in the 2nd floor bathroom.
The passenger in the first pic (yellow, ‘67) is clearly Clark Kent. It’s not just his physique, hair and glasses, or the mysterious envelope being carried. It’s the fact that while the driver is looking out the open passenger window at Clark’s midsection for their verbal exchange, Clark is trying to make eye contact through the taxi roof. He forgets sometimes that other people lack his x-ray vision.
Thoroughly entertaining read. Nice job!
Should be placed on the AC wiring hole in the hood if it makes it to LA. https://entertainment.ha.com/itm/movie-tv-memorabilia/robert-picardo-johnny-cab-life-size-maquette-from-total-recall/a/997051-2774.s
I think your link is broken. All I got was a novelty sex toy.
What the heck was going on in ’66 and ’67 with Dodge exposing people to high-decibel events?? That dueling tuba (okay, sousaphone) band right next to the Dodge and that jet flying so close seemingly overhead above the Dodges (plural, no less) certainly qualify as high-decibel events, all right.
At least the airliner passengers didn’t arrive in a Tupolev Tu-114. The Old Site described the noise for travelers on that turboprop airliner as “decibel levels roughly equivalent to a car horn blaring in your face for hours on end.”
https://www.jalopnik.com/how-the-soviet-union-once-built-the-noisiest-airliner-i-1831399230/
Maybe they did, indirectly. Aeroflot used the Tu-114 to get to Montreal so maybe some of those arrivals from Montreal got there by Tupolev.
To me, a cab is a Checker Marathon, and nothing else.
Also, those are Sousaphones.
I remember them fondly. The Checkers, not the Sousaphones.
Sorry Bish, I’m not dressing up for the sky bus. I’m popping an edible, putting on the noise cancelingest headphones that money can buy, and doing everything I can to pretend that nobody else on this cramped sardine can exists. When you’re the last person on (or above) Earth, I don’t think you’ll be sporting a 3 piece suit either.
I can’t remember the show, but they were talking to an older, well dressed New Yorker about traveling to NYC. She said that she can always spot the tourists by the way they dressed and that tourists should take more care in their appearance “because we have to look at you.” lol
Yeah, my mom’s an ex-NYC person so I think I inherited that head trash from her.
For sightseeing? Sure, I’ll dress nice. Odds are that I’ll want a photo of me at the place that I just spent all this money to get to, so I wouldn’t want to look like a schlub in it.
For public transit? No chance. There shouldn’t be too many locals hanging out in the arrivals terminal anyway, so their eyes are spared.
The “Taxi of the Future” program was a whole debacle. Three companies vied for the contract: Ford, Nissan, and Turkish manufacturer Karsan. The cab companies liked Ford’s Transit Connect model, as they could expect the durability of a Crown Vic. The public liked the Karsan, who promised to build a factory in Brooklyn and offered a unique design with windows all over. Yet Nissan got the contract. Never smelled right to me.
Maybe they dodged a missile with the Transico, because I’ve only heard terrible things about their transmissions and I can’t imagine a life made entirely of NYC start-stop traffic can do any good for them.
To be fair, there are taxis, and then there are TAXIS:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/25230924@N08/3971580295
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Volkswagen_Phaeton_TDi_Taxi_%286854079021%29.jpg
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/12/uber-hitting-e-class-taxi-roadblock-germany/
I especially like that last one for obvious reasons. 🙂
When I went to Munich to pick up my 328! at the factory in 2011, the ride from the airport into town was in the back of an S-Class diesel – the driver hit an easy 200km/hr along the way. Welcome to Germany!
The first time I went to Geneva, I was lucky enough to get a ride from the hotel in a Mercedes 600 Grosser taxi. It don’t get better than that.
Yowsa! That is pretty cool. And proof positive about how bloody RICH the Swiss are, LOL.
It’s not that the taxis themselves were glamorous, but they were a conduit to glamor. They got you to the airport for the flight to the fantastic destination, they got you to the thing to which you had been delegated, etc.
It was a small part of the overall process, but it helped to build (or at least didn’t detract from) the experience.
I still see them that way, I think you nailed it. The only times I use taxis are in conjunction with major trips (or business trips) so I can completely understand the “mental association” with success or fun.
Of course, if you’re like some of my NYC/SF coworkers with no cars, they’re more like a necessary evil because sitting with your feet in a pool of vomit is better than being stabbed on the subway (/s but that’s how I’d pitch it if I were trying to market taxis!)
Thank you, Ash
Heh – “Reverse Peristalsis Contamination vs Exsanguination: Which is Better?”
LOL, get DT’s approval and go with it as a guest piece!
I think the attitude was long over by the 1960s, but at one time (like, pre WWII), taxis were generally thought of as a somewhat upscale, prestigious form of transportation, that’s why earlier Checkers were built in typically high class body styles like landaulets and town cars to emulate limousines and a lot of taxi drivers of the era would wear chauffeur-like uniforms. Maybe the concept held on longer with advertising people, or they were trying to jog people’s memories of that era to sell their cars
I imagine many of them lived in places like NY or San Fransisco, where upscale taxis continued to be a thing until they were finally replaced by limousine services in the 1980s.
Not just any acres, either – “square acres.” Presumably much more valuable than other shapes.
That’s like PIN number. Or VIN number.
Can you imagine linear acres? I can’t.
“This man’s breed was really pretty much gone by then. At the time of this 1974 publication…”
Go back and watch “High Anxiety” from 1977.
Not everyone dressed for the Disco – Normal people still dressed like that.
And Airports were dramatic.
I honestly love that the referenced documentary for how normal people dressed is a Mel Brooks movie. And yes, I love the swoop of Dulles airport’s roof. Sadly, the entirety of that main building is now kinda useless. Where’s my future of taking a mobile lounge to my plane???? (Okay, I’ve actually done that at Dulles in the 1980s and it was a disappointment). But I digress.
Useless?
That’s where all the ticketing, check in, security and baggage claim occurs.
There are still some mobile lounges going out to Concours C and D – until the new concourses and extension to the Air Trains are completed.
Roger, Roger. I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
Yup that person certainly still existed in 1974 and probably out numbered the “hippies”, especially at someplace like an airport, which was still very business traveler heavy.
This is before my time but why was the sky yellow back in ’67?
Leaded gas?
Everyone smoked back then. Same color as their teeth.
Because we used to be a country back then.
Because people kept opening the taxi windows to let the cigarette smoke out.
Because Smog: aka, “Freedom Fog”
LA smog.
God was peeing on us because Vietnam?
That was the ozone layer. My mom used Final Net aerosol hairspray twice a day and now it’s gone.
I never really thought about that name, but what were they trying to say? “Your hair won’t move again. EVER.“
It didn’t. It was like she was wearing a helmet.
That’s where we got the term “Helmet Hair”
Those beehives weren’t holding themselves up.
It’s also useful for waterproofing an old points distributor. Just don’t get any on a hot engine block.
According to Nixon, it was the hippies.