Here’s How I’d One-Up Tesla’s Taxi Of Tomorrow By Going 47 Years Back In Time

Unless one had a problem accepting the notion of vehicles being powered exclusively by electricity, Tesla’s earliest products made a lot of sense. The Lotus-based Roadster established the brand as a maker of real cars, so to speak, as opposed to compromised conveyances that sacrificed far too much performance, style, and fun in the name of save-the-Eath bonafides. The Model S established Tesla as a maker of premium vehicles with mass appeal that happened to be electric, and to my eye it remains the best-looking Tesla. And as a luxury sedan, it was even better than most of the offerings out there since it was a hatchback (and even offered a rear-facing seat early on!).

From there, things got a bit strange. The Model X, Tesla’s three-row “SUV,” went with a headroom-cutting fastback profile and needless complex “Falcon” doors. The brand played it safe and achieved greater sales success with the comparatively conservative Model 3 and Model Y, then swung dramatically back to weird with the Cybetruck. I won’t beat the dead horse of how the trapezoid truck is less than ideal as a functional pickup, especially when compared to something like a Ford F-150 or the Maverick that’s piling up on new owner’s driveways to the tune of 100,000 units per month.

Now we’re told that Tesla will be releasing a self-driving “Robotaxi,” and images from reliable sources point to something that seems rather unsuited to being a cab. In fact, one of their other products looks a whole lot like a great taxi concept from half a century ago that I’d like to revisit and show how Tesla could make it a reality.

If That’s A Taxi Then I’m Bobby Deniro

Until the Robotaxi is officially revealed on October 10 (fingers crossed, Elon Musk isn’t exactly known for hitting deadlines), anything we say about it now is conjecture. Jason wrote about what is reported to be a disguised taxi mule undergoing testing, and it that’s the case this thing will look much like the one seen in Walter Isaacson’s book Elon Musk. That concept was a small two-seater (or possibly three across) with scissor doors, rear fender skirts, and a hatchback cargo area in back.

Naturally, this concept raises many questions, the primary one being, “Is he kidding?” How does something this small make sense as a cab? How do you accommodate more than two people and a few smaller bags? Maybe the design team figured that if something is self-driving then it doesn’t need a separate “front seat”. Possibly studies were done to show that very few trips in cabs involve more than one or two people. That’s fine, but what about those other times when they don’t? Do you need to call for a second cab?

Again, we don’t know for sure if this is the Robotaxi. Still, if it is, it looks remarkably like a two-seat Honda Insight, a car that was never, ever considered for cab duty and, to be honest, found very few buyers as a private vehicle as well. There’s a reason for that: two-seaters have very limited usefulness as cars.

The idea of a compact cab is sound, but if that thing really is the Robotaxi then it looks more like a tech bro’s wet dream than something useable as a real cab. Others have shown far better ways of utilizing a small space not much bigger than that could-be Robotaxi. Some of the best examples were literally works of art from almost fifty years ago.

Fine Art (Taxi) Fare

In 1976, before you went out to the disco wearing your super bad party ring, you might have stopped by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to see a rather unique exhibit of automobiles. MoMA has beautiful cars like a Pininfarina-designed Cisitalia on permanent display, but the machines in this exhibit were all surprisingly boxy, oddly proportioned and yellow-painted objects. They were taxi cabs.

These were not just any taxis, but prototypes of what four different companies saw as the cabs of the future. With the fuel crisis just having passed, the curator of the design department at MoMA got a grant from Mobil Oil plus the US DOT and invited manufacturers from around the world to take on the challenge of efficiency, safety, and environmental concerns to develop a working example of a new type of taxi to be shown at the museum exhibit. After that, the prototypes that would be tested by the New York Limousine and Taxi Commission on the horrific streets of Son Of Sam-era Manhattan. Let’s take a look at some of the entries and see where Tesla should have possibly taken some inspiration.

Volvo
Volvo’s entry looks almost exactly like you would expect the Swedish firm’s interpretation of a taxi to be, namely a 245DL wagon that’s been pulled in height and squished in length and width.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and the Volvo taxi’s interior shows some innovation in the way of a spacious rear seat that uses the lack of front passenger’s chair to allow for wheelchair access.

Volkswagen
At first, it looks a bit like Volkswagen phoned in their entry but you shouldn’t be hating just because they already had something in their lineup that filled the bill for the exhibit.

Besides, there’s much, much more than first meets the eye in this Type 2 “Bus”, namely an early gas/electric hybrid drivetrain. The stock VW air-cooled gas flat four still lives in back, but there’s also an electric motor as well, fed by batteries stuffed seemingly all over the interior of the bus; where the passenger used to sit, under seats, and in the rear cargo area.

Overall, this one might have been the most prescient about the future of automotive propulsion.

AMF Corportation
Not one but two entries were submitted by super-conglomerate American Machine and Foundry (AMF), a firm that at the time made everything from boats to gardening equipment to bicycles to nuclear reactors (really); they even owned Harley-Davidson from 1969 to 1981 (and nearly ran it into the ground). Oddly enough, the AMF prototypes were both steam powered; there’s an honest-to-God boiler and a two cylinder steam engine in front. It would seem like the idea of heating water might actually work on a vehicle that gets started, warmed up and then runs constantly for eight to ten hours (not that starting a malaise-era carbureted car was a picnic).

You can see the boiler up front in this schematic (AMF seems to have stolen Volvo headrests and Mercedes taillights).

One of the AMF taxi concepts looked a bit like a full-sized Fischer Price Little People school bus where you half expect the driver’s head to pivot from side to side hypnotically like the toy did when in motion:

The other one started with some swoopy sketches and ended up looking surprisingly like the 1984 Chrysler minivans that arrived a full eight years later.

Seriously, does that thing not look like a Dodge Caravan Family Truckster?

Alfa Romeo / Ital Design
If you’ve wasted brain cells reading any of my earlier shit on this site worshipping Deloreans, VW Golf MK1s and Lotus Esprits, you won’t be surprised to hear that the taxi concept for the 1976 exhibit submitted by Giorgietto Giugiaro’s Ital Design was my favorite, in this case branded as an Alfa Romeo. This design was a bit like a backward VW Bus, with a flat four from the Alfasud model located ahead of and driving the front wheels. Similar to the Volvo in seating layout with rear-facing jump seats in the passenger compartment, in this case the driver sat cabover-style over the wheels (note the backward-facing manual transmission and bus-length shifter).

The styling was pure folded-paper fabulous; clean, functional, and looking a good decade or two ahead of its time. The black-finished rocker panels were like full-surround bumpers, and the lights (plus the stylized Alfa grille) were seamlessly incorporated into these features.

It looks like something that might have been released just a few years ago until you see the period pic below with a woman in a super-seventies getup like your mom would wear proudly only to hide the photos later – some styles will never come back.

It’s funny to see this thing in these Ital Design shots on what looks like the set of CHiPs, looking so modern against the wallpaper seventies American iron. It’s so small but does so much; so versatile.

It was truly a beautiful piece of work. Giugiaro explored this type of product later with civilian-aimed concepts like the Lancia Megagamma of 1978. You might have never heard of this taxi concept, but one look tells you that it influenced many, many later vehicles such as the Renault Espace and Toyota Van.

The upper body tapers inwards sort of like a pyramid. Wait a minute? What other vehicle does that, but not even close to this artfully? I’ll give you a clue: it’s available today and it’s always silver unless you wrap it. No, I’m not going to wrap a Cybertruck in yellow vinyl, but I bet you’re thinking what I’m thinking.

Proper Use Of The Box

An angular, box-like shape will typically yield the most space-efficient form, but the Cybertruck proves that isn’t always the case. You can’t reach the bed from the side of the truck, the roofline compromises rear headroom, and the frunk space is minimal.

By contrast, Ital Design used the sharp-edged box to its advantage with their taxi. Despite being nearly 50 years old, the overall layout of the Ital Alfa taxi is a study in perfect space efficiency. Passengers sit almost all the way at the back of the cab on a three-wide bench with huge legroom beyond the size of many stretched Town Car limos. Also, rear-facing jump seats in front of them can expand seating capacity to five

Instead of shoving luggage into a trunk or rear hatch, bags can sit in the passenger compartment or, better yet, sit in the open space next to the driver where a front passenger seat might exist. Now luggage and people can both load in from the sidewalk. There’s still a shallow trunk in back for the spare tire and maybe a few of the driver’s things.

It’s been fifty years since the MoMA taxi exhibit, and you still can’t just hail any cab and have it accommodate a wheelchair. The Ital Alfa made it look effortless once you folded up the jump seats:

Let’s put these concepts to work in a design for a Robotaxi – no, Cybertaxi – that will use the same layout, but instead of the lone driver’s seat up front, we’ll allow for two (or three) passengers across to allow for up to seven or eight total passengers (if the cab is self-driving). Either that or the entire area could be stuffed with luggage.

Still, the overall design language of the controversial Cybertruck seems very similar to the Ital Design taxi concept. Here’s how it looks when we apply Cyberdetailing to the old Alfa taxi:

The peak in the roof works to conceal the TAXI sign; it could be glass to act as a sunroof or provide better visibility to rear passengers. Front passenger/luggage doors are traditional but the ones for the main passenger compartment are electric sliding; I briefly considered “Falcon” doors but why?

Layout is virtually identical to the Ital Alfa taxi, and we don’t have to shove the flat internal combustion engine under the floor in front. I’ve extended the nose very slightly for additional crumple room in a crash. As with the Alfa, no one has to go into the street behind the cab to load in cargo as on any car or taxi made today, since the “front seat” is essentially the trunk.

Having seats up front means you could have human controls like a retractable steering wheel and pedals to allow human-guided operation should the cyber-stuff go south. You could even easily make a civilian version of this thing, like Checker did back in the day – thought you might want to have the rear seat moved forward to allow for a traditional cargo area.

It’s a box on wheels that uses every cubic inch of space efficiently, so it might be something even non-cabbies would buy.

You Lookin’ At Me?! You Call That A Taxi?

It’s hard to imagine Deniro as Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle behind the wheel of one of these things. In fact, the cabs from the 1976 MoMA exhibit were apparently lambasted by traditional cabbies as too fragile, inadequately sized, and ill-suited to New York streets. None of them came close to reaching production; the downsized Chevy Impala and Ford Panther of the late seventies were the “compact” taxis that we ended up with (which were produced forever and ran eternally).

I wonder what those 1976-era cabbies would say about the upcoming Robotaxi; my guess is that my Cybertaxi at least would come closer to something they’d see as a viable solution. Not that there’s anything wrong with that thing that we believe to be the Robotaxi as a vehicle; it’s just not a taxi.

Look, we’ve all heard about how a 3M engineer failed in one of his attempts to make a super-strong adhesive for the aerospace industry, but the ultra-weak concoction he accidentally came up with was used to create Post-It notes. Similarly, with the roof chopped off, that might-be Tesla Robotaxi looks an awful lot like a little EV Miata.

Now we’re talking.

A Trained Designer Imagines What A 1980s Checker Cab Could Have Been Like During New York’s Shittiest Era – The Autopian

I Drove A London’s Black Taxi And Discovered Why They Are Some Of The Best Purpose-Built Vehicles On Earth – The Autopian

Our Daydreaming Designer Imagines The Ultimate Autopian Tour Bus – The Autopian

A Daydreaming Designer Looks At An Alternate Van Reality for Volkswagen – The Autopian