“Are you emigrating?” asked the driver, loading our last luggage in the trunk. The sun hadn’t even come out yet and we were standing in the early morning frost outside our old apartment in Wong Tai Sin. In fact, my parents, my little brother and I were not migrating – this had already happened about eight years ago – but simply heading for the airport after our last temporary visit to Hong Kong. Suddenly I felt a little sad. Not because we were leaving my grandparents or a town full of exquisite food that I was not yet old enough to fully appreciate, but because I knew this would be the last time I would ride in a red Toyota. firefighter. Crown Comfort for a while.
There is a smell. I’m pretty sure it’s just a mixture of old Toyota plastics, old Toyota air conditioners, and endless hours of exposure to subtropical heat and humidity, but the interior of every cab from Hong Kong has an extremely distinct smell. Unlike the cigarette and BO aromas that characterize many taxis in other cities, it’s actually quite pleasant. And because HK is an extremely short-landing place, meaning car ownership is reserved for the relatively wealthy, it’s a smell most Hong Kongers are familiar with.
1997 Toyota Crown Comfort LPG
- Powertrain : 2.0-litre straight-six | 4-speed automatic | Rear-wheel drive
- Powerful : 108 @ 5,600 rpm
- Couple : 112 lb-ft at 2,400 rpm
- Number of places: 5
Edges of the Pacific
A bit of history on how this however, one particular taxi from Hong Kong ended up on the streets of Toronto, Canada. It’s strictly speaking a replica but pretty good. Apparently this was a taxi in Japan, this is a 1997 Toyota Crown Comfort LPG that was shipped to Toronto for use as a movie and TV prop. Painted red and silver to imitate a HK taxi, it can be seen briefly in 2013 Pacific Rim.
In November 2021, current owner Alan Wu purchased it and has spent much of the past year restoring and redoing it, making it look as real as possible. This means yellow interior stickers in English and Traditional Chinese showing the cost of your journey and what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do, a wooden beaded cover on the driver’s seat and that red “TAXI” light that flips on the dashboard to let people know if you’re picking up passengers or not. The skylight actually works. There’s a small device that prints receipts, a red coin box with the word “ECO” printed on it for some reason, and a whole crew of cell phones of various vintages stuck above the gauge cluster. And the aftermarket audio system was tuned to Chinese talk radio. It really is the full HK taxi experience.
A realtor by day, Wu has a penchant for quirky cars. In addition to the taxi, he has a BMW i8 and drove a right-hand-drive Nissan Elgrand minivan here in Toronto before he had the red Toyota. Despite this, he says that the taxi is the car that attracts the most attention to him. Appearing in local Chinese and mainstream media, Wu’s taxi has even become a local celebrity. Appearing at events, night markets and long-term care facilities, he brought an uplifting nostalgia for the homeland to a population that could certainly use a lot after the events of the past few years (and I’m only talking about partially from COVID).
Driving from Markham – a Toronto suburb home to Pacific Mall, some of the best Asian food outside of Asia, and I think some of the highest concentration of HKers outside of HK – to downtown TO real Chinatown and back, I lost count of how many people gleefully whipped out phones to take pictures, or tried to flag us down to find out exactly what was going on here (or, in the case of an old man optimistic, how he could get himself driven).
Second-generation millennials who mostly grew up in Toronto but recognized the car after years of watching TVB TV series over their parents’ shoulders every night. Seniors who may find it difficult to tell the difference between siu may and har gao these days, but instantly locked eyes with a boxy red sedan they hadn’t seen in decades. Wu recalls a former Hong Kong taxi driver who became very emotional after driving all the way from Montreal to see it, a vehicle he hadn’t seen in 25 years. Everyone who knew what it was was absolutely thrilled to be in his presence.
Driving the HK Taxi
But enough of the rose-tinted lyrical polish on cultural significance. Time to review HK taxi with my Car Reviewer hat.
As you can imagine, the Toyota Crown Comfort was created and calibrated for comfort – I mean, it’s in the name and all. With just 108 horsepower on tap (when new, with the A/C off and on a good day), it certainly can’t be called fast by any standard. In fact, it feels like the acceleration has been specifically calibrated to be ultimately put you at freeway speed at the end of the on-ramp, but it wouldn’t disturb your passengers at all. Because it probably was. And you know what? It was nonetheless a joy as a driver.
In typical straight-six fashion, it’s all very smooth and the propane-powered Toyota unit – a technical predecessor to the 2JZ – has a nice rugged quality that made this car twist at 85 mph a bit like watching a little dog- with a job doing its best to, well, get up to highway speeds. Look at it go!
The management isn’t bad either. Clearly tuned for long, strenuous hours behind the wheel, it’s loose, comfortable to use and, probably due to the sheer vintage, delightfully more analog than many modern mainstream car steering racks. It has a progressive, positive and soft brake pedal for deceleration without disturbing passengers. Much of it, of course, feels quintessentially ’90s Toyota. The way the automatic transmission starts up is eerily similar to the first-generation Sienna I grew up with. Just like that old van, the gauges glow green in the dark while the steering wheel is the same, as are the window switches, interior door locks and handles.
As a taxi, it’s pretty good. Superbly comfortable and a little floaty, but managing to not feel like a completed boat mainly due to its relatively small size. In terms of raw exterior dimensions, the Crown is downright tiny and, I suspect, would almost be considered a subcompact by modern automotive standards. At the same time, the back seat is spacious enough for taxi service. The front and rear seats are very supportive while that period wooden cover does indeed make things a little lighter in the back, although most of its appeal here remains nostalgically aesthetic.
Noise isolation was also surprisingly good, with little discomfort for casual conversations at highway speeds. Overall, it sounds like a car designed to carry passengers in accessible comfort and be driven for hours with minimal fatigue. Because, of course, it was.
Public transport
Growing up, my mom liked to tell the story of my dad, a goofy high school teacher in his late twenties, who went out and got his taxi license as a financial backup plan the second he found out she was pregnant. with me. Like almost all immigrant parents, my parents came to Canada with the intention of giving me and my brother a better life. A life that ideally didn’t involve having to drive a red cab for work, not even as a contingency plan.
Today, I am about my father’s age when I was born. There you go, here I am at the wheel of a red Toyota Crown Comfort on the right with a speedometer on the dashboard. For my work. It’s funny how it works.
To my knowledge, my father never ended up driving a taxi, but the same cannot be said for many of my fellow journalists back home. As Beijing’s grip on the Special Administrative Region has tightened in recent years, pro-democracy news outlets have been shut down and, according to Vice, many dismissed journalists and photographers turned to the red taxi to put food on the table. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t low key and still fighting for the cause.
Ancient Apple Daily photojournalist Stanley Lai said Vice that he likes to play anti-government music in his car, and that he has decorated the interior of his taxi with a yellow lion (a Cantonese homophone with a “yellow ribbon”) as well as a small poster of a cartoon pig that’s also apparently meant for a bit of a whistle for pro-democracy passengers. Lai said that once customers understand this, the taxi becomes a place to let off steam and it becomes a makeshift therapist for people.
Wu’s taxi therefore seems to have a similar effect, albeit for Hong Kong immigrants and expats on the other side of the world. Walking there one afternoon, the old Toyota Crown has become the symbol of a Hong Kong that unfortunately no longer really exists. However, as I learned through this exercise, appreciation for culture is alive and well. This can manifest itself in a HK-style cafe in Vancouver or in a thong sui dessert joint in Sydney. Or, you know, a replica HK taxi in Toronto. Through the smiles people gave us, the knowing thumbs up, the spirit of Hong Kong lives.
Basically, a taxi’s job is to transport people to a place they cannot get to on their own. Even though he’s not actually available to take fares, this one still does. Only here, the destination is not physical.
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