Unusual Sighting at San Bernardino Pick-A-Part

[Warren Webb]

Most have seen London Taxis before but this was the first time I knew of one that was built for the American market.

It has LHD with a divider between the driver front area & the rear passenger section. In the rear it has two jump seats with the usual rear seat & the label on the dash states it carries 5 passengers in the rear.

I dont know who made this (brand) but the I.D. tag on the B pillar gave Carbodies Ltd, Coventry, England as the manufacturer. Vin # SCRUB75L1FD461420, with 4/85 production date.

It has a Motorcraft voltage regulator with a Ford type starter solinoid & what looks like a relay with Ford in raised letters.

Body & frame construction with a rugged looking front suspention. The upper arms had what looks like the old style lever action shock absorbers.

I've never seen one like this, especially here in the States & with LHD to boot. Anyone know of these? (Craig??)

[dictator27]

It may possibly be one of the taxis that Toronto, Ontario had in the sixties. The city had a fleet of several hundred. Austin was the main supplier of taxis for the British market for decades. They contracted with Carbodies to supply the bodies and finish building the cabs using Austin mechanical components. Although Austin is gone, Carbodies is still building cabs for the home market.

OOPS!! Just noticed the 4/85 build date. . Possibly built for another LHD market, and brought into the US by an individual importer?

Terry

[rbruner]

The Charleston Black Cab Co. has a fleet of British LHD taxis. Their web site is currently down whilst it is being upgraded. The cars look new. Don't know the mfg.

[Warren Webb]

This car had an emblem inside on the divider facing the rear passengers that had USA in thin large lettering & LONDON COACH in a script over it (very bold english type script). A very interesting car. Also rare around here especially & all the doors were missing as was the hood/grille but no emblems or hint of an emblem anywhere on the car.

[jclary]

If you think about it, Jaguar and just about all British made cars were floundering and struggling in the eighties. Jaguar was associated with Land Rover and it could have been that they undertook to build taxi vehicles as a way of surviving as a viable manufacturer. Ford owned them for a while and now I think they sold out to Tata Motors. Perhaps some of our more fanatical vehicle historians could help us out on this subject.

[JBOYLE]

Terry is correct, "London" cabs have had Austin mechanicals. A friend has a 50s FX 3... the FX4 came out in the late 50s. Some (most?) were made by Carbodies. IIRC, many had Nissan diesels.
I've never seen a left hand drive, so maybe it was a private owner conversion on one of the Canadan taxis that Terry mentions. The only time I take Taxis is wehen I'm in london...so I have more seat time in FX4s than Crown Vics and 90s Caprices....(thank goodness ) .

If you think about it, Jaguar and just about all British made cars were floundering and struggling in the eighties. Jaguar was associated with Land Rover and it could have been that they undertook to build taxi vehicles as a way of surviving as a viable manufacturer. Ford owned them for a while and now I think they sold out to Tata Motors. Perhaps some of our more fanatical vehicle historians could help us out on this subject.

Jaguar and Rover cars...maker of the Land Rover among other vehicles were partly nationalized in 1975 along with many other UK auto makers and the result was British Leyland.

Very little re-investment (as an example, they didn't replace the MGB with a more modern vehicle, instead gave it cheap mods like raising the heigth and rubber noses to meet US safety standards and replaced the Triumph series with the ungainly TR7 wedge, etc), suffered terrible build quality overall (some makes were better than others). I recall a Car & Driver feature of that period the said of their Jaguar test car...they didn't have bad luck, during their test it only caught fire once. I'm sure Dick Steinkemp could tell us more now that he's into restoring MGs of that period.

The Land Rover and Rover saloons (like the pretty 3500) were a success party because of their engine, an aluminum V-8 originally designed by GM and sold off in the 60s.

If there was ever a case against socialism and government running businesses...British Leyland and the UK motor industry is it.

[dictator27]

Certainly during the time Austin supplied the mechanical components the diesel engines were made by Austin.

Terry

[dictator27]

If there was ever a case against socialism and government running businesses...British Leyland and the UK motor industry is it.

Governments can be convenient scapegoats when things go wrong, and the British government is definitely not blameless in the collapse of the British auto industry, but it goes deeper than that. A lot of the blame can be aimed directly at the auto unions, too. The number of unions - something like seventeen - and the militancy of those unions played a major role as well. I knew a fellow who had worked for Rootes at the Hillman assembly plant. He said not only did the unions make life difficult for company management, they also did for their own members. They dictated virtually every move union members made to the point that morale was extremely low and product quality suffered. He got so fed up with unions virtually controlling his working life he not only quit Rootes, he left the country.

Terry