81' Taxi is back :)
- Thread starter DaveHunt
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We're in Rockland... literally on the East side of the Ottawa city line. I can walk down the street and jump across into Ottawa kind of like this:
Apparently the Iraq government ordered five thousand of them and 2,500 of them made it over. For whatever reason the rest of the order was cancelled. However the other 2500 were already built and apparently sat in Halifax for a year while they were deciding what to do with them. Because they were built for Iraq spec, they had the wrong tail lights (euro spec w/amber turn signals), no catalytic converters, no emissions equipment, etc on them. Because of that they couldn't be sold in Canada as they sat. They were retrofitted with catalytic converters and an evap canister (but no EGR system) and sold cheap to get rid of them. In 1982 apparently you could almost buy two taxis for about the same price as one brand new 1982 Malibu sedan. They had really low gearing in the back end (2.41's IIRC) and because of that they were a slug off the line but once you got them rolling, in 2nd and 3rd gear they would pull forever. They had a 200km/h speedo in them with no mile per hour markings at all. With a fair bit of flat land and nothing in the way, it took a while but you could bury the speedo in them. All of them built basically the same with really weird options. Base model interior, power steering and power brakes, an AM FM cassette and AC. All of them were 229 V6 and a 3 speed stick and they all had 14 in steel rims with dog dish hubcaps.
I have owned quite a few taxi's over the last 25 years and have driven three or four of them as daily's back when they were cheap and plentiful. Because they were a V6 with a 3-speed standard behind them nobody wanted them back then. I have stripped the standard stuff out of eight or nine of them and sold it off to guys looking to convert coupes over to a standard transmission. I still own one taxi but mine is a 350 with a 5-speed behind it now and 4.11's in the rear. When I was in my mid-twenties I used to love watching the looks on the faces of guys driving Mustangs when a four-door sedan spanked them.
The cars in the Mid-East are interesting. They must meet Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) specs. They do not meet US standards and cannot be brought to the US unless you are an authorized foreigner working here with your country plates on the vehicle. When you leave so does the car! There are Caprice SS not Impala SS , the 2006 Pontiac GTO as a Chevy Lumina. Very little smog stuff with duals and no CATS and super huge engine cooling radiators and AC Units to handle the 120+ heat! Drove an SHO when I lived there for 3 years, it sounded really loud and since there was almost no enforced speed limits I would drive it until wouldn't go any faster! We had an SS454 pickup in our department and guys would draw straws to see who would drive it for the week. With non restrictive exhaust you could feel the difference between our US Spec cars and the GCC ones.
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