What's outside today 33 - Mercedes E-Class taxi

Outside the main railway station in Hamburg that is. The only car I've been in over the last 24 hours was a W210 E-class estate taxi that took me from here to my hotel last night.


The W210 (the version of the E-Class built between 1995 and 2002) has always been considered a bit of a poor relation in quality terms compared with its predecessors, the W123 and the W124, but I noticed that the one I was in last night was still running well with over 400,000 km on the clock. The only area in which these cars seem to show any significant deterioration is their damping, which tends to give the impression of being a bit worn and floaty. The diesel engines always sound super-fit, and the interiors stand up well, even on the W210, it seems.

Even so, as the photo shows, other cars are making inroads into German taxi ranks these days - look at that Touran, for example. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Mind you, in Schwerin in eastern Germany I did see a Dacia Logan being used as a taxi earlier this year. At least things haven't slipped that far in prosperous Hamburg - yet.

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.