I’ve been sworn to secrecy about it for some time now, but I’m finally allowed to say something. I’ve mentioned in the past that my brother-in-law Cabe works in the automotive industry, but up until now I haven’t been able to say exactly where that is: He is one of the generically named company, The Vehicle Production Group’s very first employees.

It’s doesn’t matter if you have such a generic name when your product has a strikingly flashy name like The Standard Taxi. The Standard Taxi is a purpose-built cab for the U.S. market much in the same vein that there is a purpose-built cab for the London, England market. Other than that coincidence in concept, the Standard Taxi is in no way similar to the London cab.

When Cabe visited last Christmas, I was able to see some of the artist’s renderings of the vehicle and was immediately intrigued by its engineering. Since then, I’ve probably asked Cabe three-hundred stupid questions about the vehicle, its purpose, its design, and an additional hundred questions about the cab industry in general. It’s an amazingly interesting project.

When I was in Michigan this summer, we visited the design and engineering firm for the vehicle and I was completely impressed. There, we sat in the fully enclosed mock-up of the interior and I listened to Cabe as he described the interior and why particular design decisions were made. Everything inside and outside of the vehicle has a reason (purpose) as to why it was made or designed in a certain way:

• The front and rear door skins are all interchangeable. They can be quickly and easily replaced or swapped. This lowers the number of parts a livery would need to stock.
• The same can be said for the fenders, each corner is swappable with its diagonal counterpart.
• The bumpers are hefty; designed to withstand the frequent small impacts that occur in the daily operation of a cab.
• The seats are comfortable and easy-to-clean. There are three across in the back, and a fourth “jump-seat” behind the driver.
• There’s a ton of passenger room inside.
• Every cab can accommodate a wheelchair in addition to the other four passengers. This is no small accomplishment.
• The trunk can accept up to four full-size golf bags while still being able to carry around a spare tire.

They conducted extensive research (I was lucky enough to be able to witness some of it) on the duty-cycle of taxis in different cities across the country. Armed with that research, they were able to calibrate the powertrain (read: fuel delivery system, transmission, and final drive ratio) specifically for a taxi cab’s duty-cycle. Vehicles commonly used as Taxi’s in the U.S. were originally designed for consumer or fleet use, and therefore have powertrains designed to work in any application, not just taxi cab use. According to David Bjerke, the Chief Engineer for the project, it’s projected that the Standard Taxi will get about 15 miles per gallon of gasoline. On the outside looking in, that doesn’t seem like very good fuel economy until you realize that a cab’s routine is usually very slow, city-based driving, often with the vehicle somewhat loaded. Most taxis in the U.S. have fuel economy ranging between 6 and 10 MPG. In a worst case scenario for a company upgrading their fleet from another vehicle make, they’ll receive a 50% increase fuel economy! That’s a huge savings for cab operators (and it may even make the “greenies” happier).

Cabe will disown me for publicly saying this, but I was shocked when I first saw the photos of the completed prototype (only the frame had been completed when I saw it being built in late July). I was shocked at how ugly it is. In an interview with the Seattle Post Intelligencer yesterday, the president of Vehicle Production Group, Mark Klein pointed out that “it wasn’t designed to look like a Corvette. It’s designed for function; to do a job.” Thankfully, I don’t think exterior aesthetics matter at all to taxi operators. Function takes precedence over everything else, and this vehicle has that in spades. I can’t wait until Las Vegas is rife with them and I can ride around in comfort instead of having to contort my body into all sorts of strange shapes in order to fit in one of the current “standard” taxis. The new Standard Taxi is anything but standard.