Volkswagen's black cab

EVER wondered what the iconic black cab would look like if a group of German engineers went about redesigning it?

That's the question Volkswagen have put to the public with its Taxi Concept Car, which it launched in London this week complete with a raft of what it calls “tongue-in-cheek” design touches.

Naturally, it's black and has a sign with the word TAXI written on it in large, luminous letters, but the rest of the details are either a) a tad fatuous or b) not really taxi-esque enough. The stylised Union Flag on the roof, for instance, would be fine as a sort of cheeky style statement atop a Mini Cooper, but unless you've somehow landed at Heathrow and made it to the exit without working out which country you're now in, I can't see it being much use on Volkswagen's reinvention of the cab.

What about, for instance, fitting a stereo that only plays MOR and Easy Listening? I have, for instance, only encountered these genres being played on sound systems in taxis, which in the happy haze of a drunken hour sound like a cross between an Enya cover of Fleetwood Mac's back catalogue and a blue whale giving birth. You can also never trace these mysterious radio stations the following morning.

Taxis, too, are usually equipped with a cheap, nasty faux leather you'd never see in any normal car; I know it's a cover designed to make it easy to clean a reveller's kebab/Smirnoff Ice vomit cocktail, but it's not a feature VW's mentioned on its taxi, which makes me think they haven't thought of it.

And don't forget the piece de resistance: the drivers themselves, who are more often than not lovely, intelligent people but on the very odd occasion seem to be opinionated chaps you'd be forgiven for assuming are practising for a BNP pre-entry oral exam. In the past friends and I have been forced into all sorts of conversations you thought had been left behind at Bernard Manning gigs, circa 1980.

Volkswagen misses out on these quintessentially British details, you see...