Great spots 1 - VW Phaeton taxi

More on the Phaeton; everyone who drives it - this includes me - says it's great, but it's been a sales flop because it's difficult to persuade people to buy an expensive luxury car with a VW badge. This one, which I spotted at Munich airport this afternoon, has been put to good use as a taxi. I'm not sure this is the sort of thing its makers had in mind but I'm fairly certain it will stand up to hundreds of thousands of kilometres of hard use without any problems.

That creamy off-white paintwork, by the way, is the standard colour for German taxis, which all used to be black until the late sixties. The switch to the lighter colour scheme was justified on the grounds that it would keep taxis' interiors cooler in summer. Not sure how that looks now air-con is so widespread. Some areas of Germany have started to relax the strict colour requirements which means taxi ranks will look a lot less tidy and uniform - which is to say, a lot less German - than they used to.