Sci-Fi’s Taxi Of The Future Is Finally Here
Total Recall’s Johnny Cab was eerily accurate
Car Design
Sci-Fi’s Taxi Of The Future Is Finally Here
Most of the time, science fiction is hilariously wrong about how the future is going to look like. Disregarding a few gimmicky attempts at these, flying cars have never gained traction, commercial space travel was definitely not available by 2001, and we don’t have holographic movie billboards. More importantly, I can’t go on Amazon and buy an actual hoverboard.
But sometimes, sci-fi gets their predictions right. Star Trek had something very close to tablets or smartphones way before they were a thing, and video calls or self-driving cars have featured in movies for years before they existed.
In some cases we can also argue this happens the other way around, and it’s popular sci-fi that influences and shapes how the world of the future actually ends up looking like. This is mostly true about design: while we can’t produce a teleporting device just because we’ve seen it in a movie, we can make a living room inspired on a certain movie style.
Just like this, architecture has taken more and more inspiration in ideas from science fiction. Art (movies, TV shows, comic books…) set in the future gets designers to explore what they would do when unbound by the constraints of technology. Then, as our scientific knowledge evolves, it brings us new options in manufacturing processes or material science that had never been before. So it’s only natural that design-related fields such as architecture or car design look back into older sci-fi looking for inspiration.
The clearest example of sci-fi inspired automotive design is Tesla’s Cybertruck, whose shape is a direct consequence of the choice of material and manufacturing method. While Elon Musk concedes it was inspired by the submarine Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me and the cars in Blade Runner, you can draw parallels with many other science fiction vehicles such as the Landmaster from the late seventies Damnation Alley.
But let’s go back to Blade Runner for a moment. The spinners (the flying police cars) draw heavily from the concept cars of the era: the wedges from the 1970s and early 1980s. During this time, concept cars showed us a future where cars would be aggressively pointy and sleek. In both the original and Blade Runner 2049, the spinners look just like that:
Despite the two front appendages, it’s hard not to see similarities with wedge-styled concept cars like the Alfa Romeo Carabo, the Lancia Stratos Zero, or even the Lamborghini Countach.
This design language extended to the taxis in the original Blade Runner. While a slender, low-roof shape would be hugely impractical as a taxi, Syd Mead managed to design a body that didn’t stray too far from that:
But interestingly, sci-fi movies weren’t the only place where the shape for the taxi of the future was being decided. Six years earlier, Italdesign had designed a concept car at the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art, as a proposal for the “The Taxi Project: realistic solutions for today” exhibition. The goal was to create a cleaner, more efficient taxi for New York. Just look at it:
Despite being an actual car with an actual engine that could have existed as a taxi in an alternate reality, the Alfa Romeo New York Taxi was already wedge shaped, and featured some clever solutions to maximise interior space.
This charmingly retro-futuristic taxi wasn’t the only attempt car manufacturers made at the wedge-cab. In 1972, Peugeot had already tried such a concept with the 204 H4 manufactured by Heuliez:
With all these precedents, it seems clear that Syd Mead hadn’t reinvented the wheel. There was already a clear design convergence for what “The Taxi Of The Future” will look like, and Blade Runner’s taxis only strengthened the idea. Just like in Inception, the seed had been planted.
Years passed, and in 1990 Hollywood gave us Total Recall. Which is really cool in this context because it doesn’t just feature a taxi: it features a robotaxi.
The self-driving Johnny Cab is one of the most obnoxious vehicles ever to appear in a movie, as it features a puppet-like robot driver taken straight out of the depths of the uncanny valley. But its shape is… well, the shape of the Taxi Of The Future!
It’s 2022 now — three years after the setting of Blade Runner — and robotaxis do exist. While they are not operating everywhere, they are no longer a fantasy of science fiction movies.
There is a number of self-driving car companies working on making self-driving taxis widely accessible. If there is one that stands out in 2022, that is Waymo: the self-driving branch of Alphabet (Google).
Up until now, Waymo has used the Chrysler Pacifica minivan as their development platform. In December 2021, Reuters published that Waymo had a partnership with Zeekr, a chinese car manufacturer in the Geely group, to develop their next-gen platform for their robotaxis.
You probably have seen it already making the rounds on the internet, but in case you haven’t, here it is:
This announcement happened a mere two weeks after British manufacturer Arrival announced that it would partner with Uber to make bespoke vehicles for the ride-hail industry.
Through repeated appearances in sci-fi and pop culture, the shape for the taxis of the future has been long agreed. So while Zeekr’s and Arrival’s new wedge-cabs are hardly inventing a new shape, they are the last straw to reshape the Taxi in our minds. Just like the iPhone turned our collective mind’s imagery of the phone into a rectangle with rounded corners, these new vehicles are making us rethink what taxis look like.
Alfa Romeo, Peugeot, Blade Runner, Total Recall: You all got it right. The Johnny Cab was after all the Robotaxi Of The future.