(Note: the writer obviously transposed “month” to “week” so the weekly mileage, and all the service intervals, undoubtedly should be “per month”, not “per week”. If you make that change every time you see “week”, it starts to make sense. It didn’t until I figured that out. Too bad; because it’s interesting in principle, and it works once that fatal flaw has been compensated for. PN)
As it’s NYC-taxicabs-of-the-1970s day, here’s a vintage print double feature: first, a taxi garage foreman tells all about how he keeps the cabs running, then a magazine personality of the day tries his hand (and other parts) at what “hacking” used to mean. Yes, it’s all here:
• Marvel! at spark plugs and breaker points once a week!
• Snicker! at a whack on the knuckles of drivers who fiddle with the distributor!
• Gawk! at a pile of cooked starters and alternators!
• Cringe! at the loutish, predatory behaviour of Joe Gutts as he plays cabbie/stalker/drunk!
• Nod! in vigourous agreement at “Don’t Take No Crap From Nobody” !
• Click! the magazine cover pictured above to open a PDF in a new tab!
Make your car last 10 years – LOL. My newest car is 17 years old. Times have changed.
And they were pleased to get 10 or 11 mpg. No wonder the Prius has taken over as the go-to taxi.
My thought exactly.
Quite so. The average age of a passenger car on American roads in 1969 was 5.1 years. Now it’s within a hair of 12 years—that’s the average age!
Nice article but something is a little off. If these cabs (as stated) do 75k-80k miles a year, then they are not doing 7000 miles in a week. In fact to do 7000 miles in a week, it would have to be going over 40mph for every single minute of every single hour of every single day. In NYC. If he’s really replacing plugs every week I suspect he has a cousin who is the Champion sales rep… Perhaps they meant monthly instead.
There’s a fatal mistake here, about the 7000 miles per week. In the following article, which is a test of a NYC cab, it states that the average NYC cab rolls up 7-8k miles per month! Big difference. And that the cabs are typically kept for 18 months. Or about 150k miles. Which all makes sense, and adds up, unlike the first article.
But that also throws out almost everything else as being relevant in the first article, meaning the the service intervals (oil change twice per week, tune ups once per week, etc.) are way off.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the writer fucked up majorly and transposed “month” to “week”. Then all of those service intervals suddenly do make sense.
Too bad; it would be a good article except for this colossal mistake that totally throws everything off.
Sure, but it’s still an enjoyable snapshot from its day and time—and perhaps a clue as to why Science & Mechanics magazine no longer exists.
Yes, I agree it’s a nice snap shot. Thanks for posting this Daniel! At first I didn’t realize it was a PDF, and thought the post was messed up. The PDF format is much nicer.
Maybe for you. I was utterly perplexed by it, as it made no sense. Tune ups every week? Oil changes and lubes twice per week?
It’s not a snapshot from its day and time. A snapshot reflects accurately what the camera sees. This is like the mirror in the fun house; grossly distorted.
I’ve long been interested to have a better sense of how these taxis were operated and serviced, and until I figured it out, it left me utterly confused.
The truth is that figuring out the mistakes in stuff that gets submitted/posted here takes way too much time out of my life, and is not exactly “enjoyable”. It gets old. But I’m rather persnickety about not running misinformation here, unless it’s clearly presented as such, or as sheer opinion, or parody.
Sorry, I guess I didn’t express myself clearly: a snapshot of car-related magazine articles from its day and time. I didn’t realise it would set your teeth on edge so.
Car and Driver had their share of outrageous articles in the 70’s as I recall.
Would like to see that $1400 buggy article.
I want to know about that street buggy.
Meyers Manx SR or SR II. One of the few kit cars that I still crave. Fantastic styling, IMHO, and practical VW Beetle mechanicals.
When I went to Waterford Hills raceway this summer, a local VW club stopped by and one of the members had a buggy like this one.
How to make a car last 10 years? Get a Dodge with a slant six. Seems pretty straightforward.
S&M magazine would have a different content these days 😛
Funny articles! What a strange magazine!
I’d forgotten all about this magazine. It was a step down from publications such as Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Mechanix Illustrated. I guess Joe Gutts was supposed to be their answer to Tom McCahill. Didn’t even come close.
I’m too young to remember P & M, but I do remember Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, both of which were similar in content to this magazine. One trip to my graqndmother’s house in the 1980’s resulted in a box of then-10 year old Popular Science magazines. I devoured them, even though all the car ads had dated cars in them. The magazines got thrown out in a move. I wish I had them for the vintage car ads.
Recurring theme of these magainzes: amphibian cars and aerocars. The editors seemed obsessed with cars that could pull double-duty. And I was, too, back then…
Well, here ya go!
Google Books’ collection of PS and PM is great, I love reading the old “new inventions” and “what’s coming” articles to see what did and did not actually go anywhere.
Unfortunately they don’t have Mechanix Illustrated. It seems like after Fawcett sold itself to CBS in 1977 its’ titles and IP were scattered to the four winds. The Shazam franchise was sold outright to DC Comics who had been licensing it (long story), Woman’s Day eventually wound up with Hachette, Fawcett’s paperback operation to what’s now Time Warner (in a separate, earlier deal than the DC one) and MI…just kinda fizzled out.
The magazine never acknowledged McCahill’s 1975 death, possibly because they admitted “he was the franchise” and an important part of getting Fawcett sold off. By the early ’80s MI was restructured and rebranded as a home improvement-focused mag under another title.
Maybe so, but Joe has an awesome name!
This is a topic about which I know a lot. My taxi days were the next generation of cars, which had electronic ignition. This greatly reduced the amount of maintenance a taxi needed.
Everything in a GM B body of the generation, except the engine, would fail at almost exactly 200,000 km.
The part about the batteries was correct: I saw many the cab owner toast an alternator because was was too cheap to pay for a good battery and not replace it once a year regardless of how it tests.
We ran our fleet on LPG and for a commercial fleet, it was the way to go. Even after 50,000 km the oil would come out like new. I used to replace it every other monthly inspection, or about 20k km. Spark plugs lasted about forever. An Olds 307 or 350 SBC would go pretty much forever on LPG.
The biggest determiner of how long cab will last is who is driving it.
Big +1 on electronic ignition. It really made a long list of things very much better, not least of which was spark plug and tuneup durability (and fuel economy, and oil cleanliness and resultant engine durability, and…).
Then (for those not running LPG like you) shortly afterward came no-lead gasoline and gave another big boost in all those same areas and more: spark plug useful life, tuneup durability, oil cleanliness and resultant engine durability, exhaust system durability.
I have no doubt you’re absolutely right about driver behaviour being the prime determinant of how long a cab (or most any other car) will last, though I guess in some cases it might not be the limiting factor—such as a car with a notorious weakness in the transmission, engine, or otherwise like that.
By nature, as a taxi operator, you are going to know which cars give you the best reliability. The reason Fords were not used as much as GM and Chrysler stuff was reliability and fuel consumption. The basic drive trains in Fords were okay, but the rest of the car rapidly fell apart. The Ford Windsor V-8 and C6 was notorious for high fuel consumption. Later Panther cars didn’t adapt nearly as well to LPG as the GM stuff did.
As for individual buyers, well, there is plenty of information out there about which cars are going to have major component failure, but buy the cars anyway, or without and research. A friend recently bought a CPO Focus without knowing about the Powershift issues. I certainly didn’t mention it!
I actually found the Joe Gutts taxi test rather well-written, in a dated, imitation-noir style. And though I have no memory of this magazine (I devoured PS and PM at the library every month, but even Mechanix Illustrated seemed like a low budget endeavor … I mean, a magazine title should be spelled correctly) I did recognize the mention of editor Tony Hogg; he wrote for Road & Track at some point, and was British if I recall correctly.
It’s easier to trademark a deliberately misspelled word.
In general I’d say that Mechanix Illustrated was a notch below Popular Science & Popular Mechanics in the magazine pecking order. They did have Tom McCahill though which made them tops when it came to automotive reviews. 🙂
Apart from the service-interval cockup, there are some other questionable statements in the article. Advancing the timing for “snappier pickup” hastens and aggravates spark plug fouling and breaker point pitting…? H’mmm. If the timing’s advanced far enough to cause severe ping, you can get tiny little globs of molten piston metal (eek!) spattered on the plugs, and that’ll eventually short ’em out. Or if the timing’s that far advanced and the car’s running on leaded gasoline (yes, at that time) and the driver’s revving the snot out of the engine under very high load for prolonged periods (unlikely in city taxi service), you can get spark plug glaze-fouling: the lead salts form a sort of conductive glassy coating on the plug, shorting it out. That first case (metal globs) seems medium-unlikely and the second case (lead glazing) seems highly unlikely given the low road and engine speeds involved in congested NYC traffic. And I’m pretty sure I understand enough to say no amount of monkeying with the ignition timing will worsen or lessen breaker point pitting.
There are inconsistencies, too. The first page says the shop uses “New Champion plugs and AC points”, and the second page says the shop uses “only genuine, factory OK’d parts”. Champion plugs were OE on Chrysler cars, but AC points were not—that’s a GM brand.
It’s been so long since I’ve messed with points that I don’t know if this is a possibility, but if you turn the distributor to change timing, can that affect point gap? And too small a gap could lead to racing and pitting perhaps … though I was always taught that was due to degradation of the condenser. Anyway, I vaguely recall setting timing first then gap/dwell.
@dman, you always set the dwell before the timing, as the points opening is what triggers the coil.
Duh, yeah. I told you it’s been a long time. Probably my last car with points was the Vega I sold in 1980, and my last bike the Honda I sold in 1981. My Craftsman dwell tach and timing light disappeared decades ago too.
Yeah the AC points and only genuine factory parts was a contradiction that stuck out to me. Prestolite was the supplier for at least some of the Mopar ignition parts.
And yeah monkeying with the timing isn’t going to affect point wear.
The distributors in those ’70 Dodges would’ve been Chrysler-built ones—the only Slant-6s to get Prestolite (at the time “Auto-Lite”) distributors in Northern North America were all the Canadian-made ones through ’66 and a few Canadian-made ones through ’69. Now, did Chrysler farm out to Prestolite the points for the in-house distributor? Donno, but they are of design different to the ones used in the distributors Chrysler bought from Prestolite.
And if they didn’t buy them from Prestolite they could have bought them from AC since GM wasn’t shy about their parts divisions selling to other mfgs.
This approach is quite different than the one Yellow Cab of San Diego took when I drove for them in the winter of ’76-’77. Except for a couple of ’73s, the bulk of the fleet were ’70 and ’71 big Chevrolets, meaning they were by then 7-8 years old! And had 500-600k miles on them, if not more. They must have had close to 100 cabs, and a well organized central maintenance facility, where they rebuilt their own engines (sixes) and transmissions (Powerglides).
The streets and highways of San Diego were of course quite smooth, but still this was a mighty long time to hang onto cars. Of course the company did go bankrupt a year or two later, as independent operators were given more licenses, and they simply operated more efficiently.
Our high school library had a subscription to S&M (gotta like that title). That rag had 2 auto writers. Both assumed characters. Joe Gutts was supposed to be a blue collar everyman. The other character, Basil Thursday, assumed the identity of a stuck-up English turd.
When they both tested the same car, some of their banter was hilarious. The writers obviously had a good time, but I always wondered whether there was a real car involved in their testing.
Making a car “last 10 years” back then is like making it “last 25-30”, today, 😉