CHECKER A-SERIES

Taxi Driver (1976)

A recent survey suggested that in the whole history of cinema, the most familiar car is a New York Ford Crown Victoria Yellow Cab. Manufactured between 1992 and 2011, it has featured nearly 5000 times in the movies. But the most famous cab of them all is the Checker driven by Travis Bickle, the Robert de Niro character in Martin Scorsese’s greatest film.

In any city, the local cabs provide passengers with edited insights into local preoccupations. Just as the driver creates his own micro-culture, so the car betrays larger concerns. Bickle, a brooding, foul-mouthed and angry Vietnam veteran, sits in command of his own world, a scratched and yellow Perspex partition separating him from passengers sitting on bottom-polished dirty blue vinyl.

The bespoke Checker was a US equivalent of the unique London black cab. Its origins were in a Chicago garage and taxi business owned by an entrepreneur in the schmutter trade. Bickle’s car is a 1974 A-series with a 350ci Chevrolet V8 grumbling through a three-speed auto ’box. During the production run from 1959 to 1982, the Checker A-series was all but unchanged.

Many mourned its passing, a distinctive piece of American culture – crude, assertive, lovable – that succumbed to globalisation. In this way the Checker supported Travis Bickle, who looks through his wraparound windshield and sees a city in decline. Most Manhattan cabs today are Toyotas or Nissans. You wonder whether Bickle might have been right.