Volvo City Taxi

The Volvo City Taxi, also called the Volvo Experimental Taxi, is a concept car that Volvo built in 1976. It was Volvo's answer to a design brief from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which asked the major car makers to propose a cleaner, more efficient, safer and more user friendly taxi. The car is powered by a six cylinder diesel engine that drives the front wheels. It was designed to take a wheelchair inside and has a sliding passenger door on the curb side that slides forward. Volvo built it around its safety cage idea, with a reinforced passenger area and crumple zones at the front and rear, and fitted impact bumpers of the five mile per hour kind and a rubber protective strip. Passengers had a pull down bar instead of seat belts, and short overhangs on a tall body gave a tighter turning circle and a smaller footprint than a conventional cab.