The Ultimate Autopian Taxi Bus Is Out There And We Must Have It: Cold Start

By default, the “most Autopian taxi” is our Nissan NV200, currently trekking across the country with your usual Cold Start author Jason Torchinsky at the helm. But what would constitute The Ultimate Autopian Taxi, if we had set out to find such a thing?

I imagine the ideal candidate would be a machine that met the requirements of people-moving with a solution as brilliant as it is idiotic; be highly unconventional in appearance and either extremely small or absurdly large; and have failed miserably in the market.

With those criteria in mind, it took me .34 of a second to conclude The Ultimate Autopian Taxi is a 1968 Jetway 700 limo.

Today, any airport-based rental car agency or airport-servicing hotel will likely fill its taxi-bus needs with a full-sized van cab-chassis outfitted with a shuttle bus body. It’s the most logical and economical choice, and if you’ve ever flown anywhere ever, you’ve almost certainly ridden in one.

As for the least logical and economical option, stretching a standard sedan or station wagon and doubling its door count seems like the perfect bad idea, but that was apparently the logic of bygone days. Firms like Armbruster-Stageway chopped full-sized American cars in half to make six- and eight-door limousines to transport from nine to twelve passengers and their luggage, though the standard trunk meant that much of the cargo these Mad Men-era jet-setting passengers toted likely ended up on the roof.

The stagecoach in the company’s logo calls back Armbruster’s beginnings in 1887 as builders of horse-drawn “holdup-proof coaches” with secret compartments that Jesse James-style bandits ostensibly couldn’t find.

The firm continued with these concoctions up until at least the mid-seventies as these Pontiacs prove:

Armbruster was not alone. Jason has already written about the Checker wagon with many doors, the Aerobus. Meanwhile, two Arkansas businessmen named Waldo Cotner and Robert Bevington did good business converting Oldsmobiles into ambulances and hearses, and when they saw the massive front-wheel-drive 1966 Toronado they must have realized that a long limo that didn’t need a driveshaft the length of a drilling rig shaft might be a good idea.

Cotner and Bevington’s company had been acquired in 1964 by milk truck-and-school bus-maker Divco-Wayne Corporation, and they wanted nothing to do with the Toronado concept. Cotner and Bevington decided to leave to pursue their dream and founded American Quality Coachworks in 1968, their first (and ultimately only) product being the Jetway 707 airport limo. However, their plan was to make a whole series of front-drive vehicles like ambulances and hearses.

Funny observation: the image above looks like it was originally a snap of a 1967 car, and an artist at AQC modified the front end with the 1968 nose!

With no driveshaft hump, a raised roof, and a large cargo area, the Jetway seems like a winner on paper; enough so that GM appears to have followed the same formula for their 1973 GMC Motorhome. Still, the Jetway wasn’t cheap, and the gloriously outrageous appearance must have been an acquired taste.

I don’t know when I became convinced that this was the Greatest Motor Vehicle Of All Time, but I somehow remember being single-digits old and seeing black-painted ones in my Washington, D.C. hometown and having my young mind explode. This appearance on 17th Street near the White House that I just discovered in All The President’s Men seems to confirm their existence in that time period.

Apparently, there was a remake made of the Beatle’s film Sargent Peppers Lonely Heart’s Club Band that starred, of all things, the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. This stinker featured a Jetway 707 with the roof cut off – probably the best part of the movie (11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes).

AQC didn’t last long before going bankrupt; production numbers are all over the map, with some claiming nearly 150 were made while more reliable sources claim around 52 were built. Armbruster finally hit the end of the road in 1990, though the name has been revived. One of the last appearances of this odd type of vehicle was done by Chicago’s Limousine Werks on a Buick “whale” wagon in the mid-nineties.

Still, it’s the Jetway 707 that we want. There can’t be many left (estimates are about nine), but you see them for sale from time to time, like this one that appeared a few years back.

Another one with odd “Centipede” rocker panel graphics showed up not long ago. This was spotted here on the Woodward Dream Cruise years back but has obviously fallen into disrepair since.

This one appears to have been acquired by Cleveland Power & Performance for a possible restoration, and he gives a pretty nice history and walkaround if you’re interested.

It’s Sunday as I write this, so I can’t reach out to see if more work on the Centipede ever commenced. If they’ve given up and gone back to profitable and more ubiquitous Mustang-and-Chevelle restorations, it would be an ideal Autopian cross-country steed in its current condition (well, put down some plywood where the floor was). Hey, if we made a “Broughan D’Elegance” level of membership for twelve lucky members at a grand or two a pop to “invest” in next summer’s trip for a ride-along in this thing, maybe we could convince the Powers That Be to take a Jetway on.

That’s a really, really stupid idea, yet very Autopian.