See one of the firms here had a few silver Octavia's a few years ago but they've all vanished now.

Aside from the hackneys, Mercs, Skodas, those Berlingos which seem to be good for wheelchair users, and Passats. I liked a trip in a Honda Accord estate with all the leather, and I once did an extremely scary taxi trip from Wick to Inverness in a blizzard, riding in a tatty old Mondeo. <gulp>

New York cabs (and Chicago....and Miami to an extent) are often Ford Crown Vics. New York held a competition to design new ones, and some sort of Nissan van won, even against American car manufacturers. There are Priuses and they look silly in yellow!

Edited by Bobbin Threadbare on 21/09/2011 at 22:09

The 1.9 SDI and TDI Octavias are good taxis, but it'll be interesting to see what taxi-drivers do when they need replacing, as anything with DPF is presumably bad news for taxi work. Maybe the 1.2 or 1.4 petrol will find favour: there's even a Superb 1.4 available which must be at its best in town rather than on motorways.

In Edinburgh and Glasgow most of them are either TX1s or those ghastly converted Peugeot van contraptions. Clearly you need some taxis suitable for disabled people, but why do they all need to be?

Toyota Avensis is very popular round here, along with Peugeot 406 HDIs and Citroen Xsara Picassos

Taxi's may cope with DPF's ok as the cars are in use all day and in areas like this they find themselves doing trips to Heathrow and back clocking up many many miles. City taxi's might be different, the car may be in use all day but its going everywhere at 25mph (which is why i thought a Prius would be good for city taxi). My father was a taxi driver for 10 years, when he started in the 80s they used Granada's when petrol was lovely and cheap. By the time he finished the 1.9TD Peugeot's were the firm favourite i remember.

Its interesting in some cases they prefer to keep older ones going rather than risk it with DPF'ed new diesels and if they dont sort them problems out then Hybrids might become more popular as taxi's in the UK. I did notice a couple of years ago alot seemed to replace the cars at once for just pre-DPF diesels, perhaps on purpose.