We’re Taking Our 375,000-Mile NYC Taxi Across The Country To See You

You remember our hapless $800, 375,000-mile ex-New York City taxi, don’t you? Sure you do. Yellow, Nissan, kind of banged up, absolutely filthy, considered a biohazard, worked like a dog for a decade of hard NYC taxi labor? You know it. We bought it as part of a sponsorship deal with Copart, and even in our short time owning it, it hasn’t had it easy. Our car-rescuing demigod Stephen Walter Gossin had a crack at it first, and he made some initial progress on getting it back in shape. Keep in mind, this is a vehicle that a Nissan dealership said would need over $14,000 worth of repairs to be roadworthy, and spending that kind of money on this steaming pile is only just slightly more likely to happen than my next fart becoming sentient and curating an Alexander Calder retrospective at the Whitney.

My Autopian co-founder David Tracy, a man more used to automotive lost causes than St. Jude, came down to North Carolina to wrench on this thing in hopes of resurrecting it. David and I spent a solid week wrenching and hammering on the taxi, and we got it in running shape, incredibly.

Oh, wait! I almost forgot: before David came down to help me work on it, a miserable tow truck screw-up launched the poor cab into a tree, smashing the rear doors:

What I’m saying is that this 2014 Nissan NV200 taxi has lived a hard life of constant toil, and every one of those hard 375,000 miles left its mark on this beast. If a magic horse were to appear and grant this cab the power of speech, I’m pretty sure it would just beg for the sweet release of death; this cab wanted nothing more than to stay in that junkyard and quietly yield to the cold yet comforting blanket of death, where there were no more fares to run, no more traffic to JFK, no more smacking wheels into curbs, no more pain.

We did not listen.

No, instead, we resurrected this cab, telling the Grim Reaper in charge of Nissans and Infinitis (and some Renaults) not today. This hardworking taxi needs a proper send-off, and we’re going to give it just that, with a trip all the way across this great nation of ours! Oh, and the first leg of the trip is from North Carolina to NYC; if you look on the cab, you’ll see I’m contractually obligated to take anyone to JFK for a flat rate of $70, so if you need a ride to JFK from Chapel Hill on June 17 or so, let me know.

The cab runs. There’s no air conditioning working yet, but I’m going to see what I can do there, and it needs a little suspension work, but other than that, I think it’s mechanically as good as it’s going to get. What may be a bigger concern is how absolutely disgusting the interior is:

There’s a reason there was a biohazard sticker on this thing. Because it was hazardous, biologically. So I’ll need to get that all nice and cleaned up. And maybe try to repair those seats.

Oh! And just for fun, I’m going to fill in the hole in the back where the taxi-advertising monitor thing was with something much better: some genuine 1980s 8-bit computing hardware!

I have an Atari 600xl – complete with 16K of RAM! – to mount in the back with that little screen there. My kid Otto is coming with me on the trip, so he needs some way to play Pole Position and Frogger and Donkey Kong and maybe learn how to program in BASIC, right? So I’ll have to install that.

This trip is not just about seeing if this cab will make it – we want to try and see as many of you as we can! So, with that in mind, here’s our planned route, and all our stops:

So, we’re going to hit the Mid-America VW Funfest in Effingham, Illinois, and we’re going to have reader meetups in Columbus at Der Dutchman Cruise-In, Lawrence, Kansas, and Denver! I’ll be gambling for next month’s payroll in Vegas, and then we finally should hit LA by the 24th, Nissan-gods willing. So, please, come see us! I’ll try to remember to bring some stickers and shirts and stuff if I have any here to give out! There are no hard plans other than going to the Der Dutchman Cruise-In, attending the VW Funfest in Effingham, and probably doing breakfast in Lawrence, so let us know if there are any other events along the way.

Just be wary of the road madness that I likely will be affected by. It’s powerful.

Oh, and one last detail! Look what we got for the cab:

A working taximeter! So, while we take this trip, we’re going to finally find out how much it would cost to take a NYC taxi all the way across the country! You know you’re curious!

Is this a bad idea? Probably, yeah! A really bad one! But we’re going to do it, anyway! I hope to see you out there on the road, and hopefully whatever tears are in my eyes will be ones of joy, and not ones of misery because I decided to drive a should-have-been-dead taxi across the freaking country like an idiot.