New York to swap iconic taxicabs for big yellow minivans

It's big, brash and noisy -- yet the yellow taxicab has become an iconic symbol of one of the world's most famous cities.

For many visitors to New York, their first glimpse of the Chrysler building or the Empire State is framed by the grimy window of a Ford Crown Victoria.

And just as those landmarks have become instantly recognizable emblems of the Big Apple, the sight of a shimmering yellow line of cabs along Park Avenue immediately says: New York.

"In the tourist districts, along with plastic models of the Statue of Liberty, it's amazing how many taxi souvenirs you'll see," says Phil Patton, automobile design correspondent for the New York Times. "There's definitely something special about the taxi in New York."

Given the iconic status of the yellow cab, the task of reinventing it for the 21st century is nothing if not daunting. Yet that's exactly what designers at Nissan are doing, after the city's mayor and the Taxi and Limousine Commission announced this month that the manufacturer had won a competition to come up with a new model that will become New York's exclusive taxicab from 2013.

"Everybody knows from movies and being in New York how much the taxi is the life of the city," says Francois Farion, design manager at Nissan Design America, who is leading the project. "Being in a hotel [in New York] and looking down the street it was immediately obvious it was a big deal to change that."

One aspect that was never going to change was the cab's color. "When you're in the city and it's 2am and freezing you want to be able to spot the cab immediately, so we had to go with the iconic yellow color," says Farion. "Quite honestly there was not much [else] we wanted to keep, because the Crown Victoria, which composes a lot of the fleet, is a car conceived in another age and the specifications are not really right now for taxi duty."

The winning design is a customized version of the NV200 minivan, already familiar in Europe, with capacity to carry four people and better fuel efficiency than its taxicab predecessors. Sliding doors will hopefully mean fewer collisions with cyclists, while an exterior horn light aims to reduce frequent honking.

Passenger perks include a crash-tested partition and airbags, more leg room, a transparent roof to admire the skyscrapers, charging stations for mobile devices and personal reading lights and climate controls. "We wanted the taxi experience to be much more like an everyday limousine," explains Farion.

While there's no doubting the interior is plusher, the exterior of the vehicle -- more soccer mom than icon of cool -- has been criticized by some for being less than stylish.

"I'd say the exterior is functional -- it's not sleek," acknowledges Paul Herzan, chairman of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, who campaigned for a new cab for the city. "But we haven't seen the finished product yet. I think people are going to be wowed by the interior. I'm not ready to say it isn't cool yet."

Herzan argues that the Crown Victorias were hardly great shakes in the style stakes themselves. "The Crown Victoria is designed to be more of a police car than a people hauler, and I felt it was funny the people in the backs of yellow taxis in New York had the same status as the passenger in a police car who usually isn't there by choice," he says.

New York has never before had one exclusive model of taxi, and as well as Crown Victorias, Toyotas and other models are currently approved for use.

Before the Crown Victoria came to rule the road in the 1990s, different brands predominated -- such as the Chevrolet Caprice.

"The Caprice was big and bulbous and quite homely -- people made fun of that," recalls Patton. "It took up a lot of space on the street without making much inside space. It was nicknamed Shamu after the killer whale at SeaWorld."

Some say it is only really the old Checker cabs -- made by the Checkered Cab Manufacturing Company and phased out in the 1960s and 1970s -- that achieved cult status.

"The Checkers came out of the 1930s -- the boxy look was characteristic of the Bauhaus style of the time," says Graham Hodges, a professor at Colgate University who has written about the history of the taxicab. "These were large automobiles which reflected a certain optimism -- a desire to give comfort to the passenger as well as indicate the prosperity of the driver in the city.

"In the 1970s and 1980s you had Dodge and Ford cars which were really passenger vehicles adapted as cabs," Hodges continues. "There was a real pessimism about the city and the car industry itself. Both were very cramped with little leg room and tended to sink on the axle so you were almost lying down on the back seat."

So can the Nissan design inspire the same loyalty as the old Checker? "The cabs in the past were associated with trips we took to New York with our mums, shows we saw on Broadway -- memories that happened to be in that taxi," says Patton. "And I feel over time that will happen again."