When I was a kid, a cabbie living on Colombo Street had a Ford Cortina Mk II for his or her work.
This was a far smaller car than the usual Holden Belmonts and Kingswoods and Ford Falcons that formed over 95 per cent of the taxi fleet in Wellington.
I don’t know if (s)he got much business as part of Capital City Cabs, easily the minor player in a town that was dominated by Wellington Taxis and Black & White and Grey Cabs Ltd.
Today I tailed a Toyota Belta taxicab. This was a Japanese import, and is better known as the Yaris Sedan or Vios in other nations.
The funny thing is, it didn’t look funny.
(Those darned Prius taxicabs look funny. They are even funnier on the motorway lugging hundreds of kilograms of batteries and hurting the environment. Especially in a city where cabs have largely been running clean natural gas since the early 1980s.)
The reason the Belta didn’t look as odd as the Cortina is more testament to how little cars have grown over the years.
Cabbies in Wellington have been defecting from the Australian full-size sedans to Nissan Cefiros and Teanas for a while, and Toyotas are, as in Dunedin, filling up the taxi ranks.
Ford diehards are going for the Mondeo, which is larger than the Falcon anyway in most key measurements (width, rear legroom)—just it has a smaller engine and there’s a diesel option.
If one considers that the Belta comes from the lineage of the Publica and Starlet, then it is tiny.
But if one considers that the Belta has a very long wheelbase and that it is as wide as mid-sized cars were a decade ago, then no wonder it didn’t look small.
Small cars are actually quite big, and big enough for most families these days. The only thing that keeps us thinking of them as small is snobbery.
In fact, the only thing that would look really funny in 2008 is an overly large car, such as a Ford Fairlane, being a cab, especially one not converted to LPG.
From Autocade
Toyota Belta/Toyota Vios. 2005 to date (prod. unknown). 4-door sedan. F/F, 996, 1296, 1495 cm³ (4 cyl. DOHC). Essentially a booted second-generation Vitz, but designed at Toyota’s Japanese studio rather than its French one, predominantly for Asian markets. Sold also as the Yaris sedan in the US and Australasia; Vios in most export markets. Interior duller than Vitz; handling acceptable for a reasonably tall car.
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