Well, I took the plunge on Friday 29th January 2010, & finally ordered my new Hackney Vehicle.
The day before, on Thursday, I had gone to Cab Direct at Coventry to see what deal they were going to offer me. BUT, I was still troubled by the prospect of committing myself to life over the next 10 years or so in a vehicle with a mixing stick that operated manual gears. I had driven an automatic since 1975 & although I am quite competent driving a vehicle equipped with a mixing stick (and regularly use one when cooking a curry), I had deep reservations as I have always found that I get far less tired when driving an automatic than when driving a mixing stick vehicle, especially when driving for a few hours continually.
Little did I know that this dilemma would be resolved for me within minutes of arriving at Cab Direct! When I asked them what the repayments would be, thinking that the interest rate was still 5% flat rate as quoted only a few weeks ago, I was told in a matter of fact, blasé fashion, that the rate was now 7%. And that’s with the Bank of England base rate not moving for nearly a year now & still at 0.5%!!! That did it for me; I wasn’t going to do business with Cab Direct, even though the salesman said he might be able to do a cheaper rate.
So, the following day after phoning Voyager MPV in Sandbach & making sure their interest rate was acceptable, which it was, I travelled up to see them with my Vehicle Encyclopaedic son Greg. Once there I met Mark Jones, the very amenable salesman, & took a 2007 Nissan NX8 Hackney Vehicle, based on the Nissan Primastar, with a semi-auto gearbox for a test drive & immediately fell in love with it. Apart from the Nissan body the rest of the test drive vehicle was Renault. Within an hour I had signed the order form & paid a £500 deposit. I was ordering a Renault NX8 Hackney Vehicle with a Quickshift 6 gearbox, based on the Renault Trafic Sport CPV.
In September 2009, Voyager MPV was accredited Renault’s Accord Produit for achieving the highest level of proficiency in their conversion for their specific Hackney Vehicle conversion. So I was happy that the base vehicle was entirely from one manufacturer & not a composition of a few or many manufacturers as with TX & Metrocab models. I asked for the delivery date to be 30th April 2010, as I did not see the point of having a new vehicle much before the HCVL on my old Metrocab expired on 10th May 2010. I collected my new Renault NX8 Trafic Sport Hackney Vehicle on the due date & proceeded to drive it extremely nervously down the M6 straight into Star City in Brum for a taximeter accuracy test by Trading Standards, which it passed well within the tolerances laid down by Trading Standards. Immediately after that it was driven to one of the Birmingham City Council’s Hackney Carriage testing station, where after a brief hiccup caused by metal debris in both rear tyres it passed the vehicle inspection too. So by 17.20hrs on the day I took delivery of my new taxi, it was ready for licensing having passed all the required Council tests.
My new cab came with quite a few extras as standard that I would have been charged very heavily for at Cab Direct. These include, alloy wheels, all-round Jet Black metallic paint (including all round colour coded bumpers, side bump strip & rear light clusters), trip computer, front fog lights, air conditioning to the front AND rear compartment (piped to the rear), rear parking proximity sensors, electric heated door mirrors, new Elba trim driver’s seat with lumbar support & arm rest (very comfortable indeed), leatherette seat trim for the passenger compartment (a £750 extra with Cab Direct) in a very eye-catching light grey with hi-vis yellow side trims on the seat squabs & back-rests, plus a few other extras that are too trivial to mention. And of course it has a Quickshift 6 semi-auto gearbox which Cab Direct cannot supply or compete with. There were some other extras that I specified myself on my new taxi, which were; London locking on the front doors (minor fault, still to be rectified), stainless steel running boards instead of the standard aluminium ones, & a tip-up seat in the front instead of the two-seater passenger seat to allow for more luggage space. The last option allowed me to go for the SWB instead of the LWB I had previously coveted. But in saying that, I did drool & salivate when I went to Voyager MPV in January & saw a LWB version of the vehicle. Talk about presence & prestige!! But I decided I would not be very popular on the ranks with such a long vehicle & besides it was an extra £1,800. But what a gorgeous vehicle is the LWB in Jet Black Hackney spec!!!
My new taxi was licensed on Friday 7th May in Brum & on Tuesday 11th May in Solihull. I will have driven about 2,000 miles in it by the time this weekend is over & I am getting well used to it now. There are a couple of minor things that need correcting with the conversion & those are in hand with Voyager MPV, who I have to say are a nice company to deal with; well at the moment they are. There is also a minor rear passenger near-side door alignment that needs to be carried out by Renault, as it’s not quite flush when closed.
So what do I think of my new taxi??
Well!!! Yes it’s bloody big, in fact it’s huge, massive & very wide too, especially with the stainless steel running boards. But the extra width inside allows for very comfortable travelling, &
the passengers just love it!! And whatever you might say or criticise from a taxi trade perspective, that’s the bottom line; passenger / customer satisfaction!! A husband & wife couple even argued over what tip to give me on a £30.80 fare from the airport to a Brum suburb. The husband holding £40 in his mitt asked for a fiver change, but the wife grabbed the money from him & giving it to me said, “Keep the change, thank you!” Now I’ve never had that before!! A £9.20 tip from a Brummie resident on a £30.80 fare!!! And I’m doing jobs that I wouldn’t have been able to accommodate before in my beloved Metrocab 6-seater. A run around the well-healed, leafy villages of south Manchester from Birmingham Airport for six passengers, including two golf bags & nine medium to large bags & suitcases; I couldn’t have accommodated that fare in the Metrocab. £240, Thank You very much Sirs, Thank You very much Sirs, bow, bow, tip hat, tip hat!!!
I’m absolutely loving it!!
Finally, a few words about the Quichshift 6 gearbox, which is quite extraordinary, or should I say I found quite different to a standard automatic gearbox & with a very pleasant bonus surprise thrown in for good measure. Getting used to the gearbox & how it changes gear was by far the biggest & steepest ‘learning curve’, (for want of a better phrase) that I had with my new taxi. Those of you, who are fully up to speed technically & mechanically, will know that unlike standard automatic gearboxes, the Quickshift 6, semi-auto, tiptronic, or whatever you want to call the gearboxes, are in fact not an automatic gearbox but a manual gearbox with an electronically operated clutch. The vehicle does not have a clutch pedal & can also be driven manually or semi-manually by using the gear lever to change gears. I eventually found the best way to drive the cab was to lift my foot off the accelerator pedal slightly when I wanted to change up. The usual kick-down is also available, now I have partially run the engine in & once it is fully run-in I expect the gear up-shifts to be more instantaneous at higher revs, which at the moment I am not asking of the engine.
AND HERE’S THE REAL BONUS!!!
Shortly before taking delivery of my new Renault NX8 Trafic Sport Hackney Vehicle, I was reading the vehicle specifications & in particular the fuel consumption figures. I had not realised that the Quickshift 6 semi-auto gearbox fuel economy figures were exactly the same as the manual gearbox version of the same model. This is entirely due to the fact that it is a manual gearbox with an electronically operated clutch, which gives the same fuel economy as a standard manual gearbox. In fact, one driver at the airport who has a 57 registration of the previous Nissan version of this taxi also supplied by Voyager MPV, told me that when he was driving it in manual mode & changing the gears with the gear lever, he was getting marginally worse fuel consumption than when he was just allowing the semi-auto gearbox to do its thing.
On the first tank-up, I was returning 32.2mpg, but now on my third tank-up I am at 34.9mpg & rising. For such a huge vehicle & with a semi-auto gearbox, which operates for all intents & purposes just like an automatic, those are impressive figures. The only down side is the cost of fuelling up. The tank capacity is specified at 90 litres, but the first time I tanked up to the top it took 90.34 litres with still over an eighth of a tank full showing on the fuel level indicator on the instrument panel. That would indicate a fuel tank capacity of about 110 litres & not the 90 litres as in the specifications. 110 litres at 122.9p a litre works out at £133 for a full tank, but the trip computer is showing that a full tank of diesel will have a range of over 800 miles, so that can’t be too bad; it’s just the money I have to shell out when I tank up.
Here is a link to the Voyager MPV web page for the Nissan NX8;
http://www.voyagermpv.co.uk/index.php?a ... stingID=12
This shows a few photos of the Hackney Vehicle that I bought, but these are old pictures & do not do any justice to the specs of my new taxi. Hopefully I will take a few photos of my cab in the next few days & ask Alex to post them on here as I’ve tried to post some photos supplied by Voyager MPV, but without success as it seems they are not in JPEG version.
I hope you’ve found this post of interest.
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I love my air con I have it on all the time 
and how the hell do you know how big my boobies are 
