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How to convert a cheap car into a Japanese taxi…with tape and a wild imagination

Oona McGee Sep 4, 2023
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Like a really bad, cheapo episode of Pimp My Ride.

Every company needs a company car, but here at SoraNews24 we like to do things differently. That’s why we bought a Minica in 2014 as our company car, purchasing it for the budget price of 980 yen which, at the time, was US $9.80.

Over the nine years we’ve had it, the little vehicle has been bringing us endless amounts of joy, patiently putting up with all our cheapo attempts to pimp it, like that time we covered it with giant stickers of Mr Sato and drove it around Tokyo, and that other time we de-customised it with black marker pens for its current look.

▼ The Minica, back in its heyday as the Sato mobile.

These days, our little Minica has been enjoying a quiet life of semi-retirement in the countryside, whiling away its days at the SoraHouse, another cheap investment we picked up for the super low price of 1 million yen (US$9,100 yen at the time).

However, this week, our boss Yoshio had a grand idea for the Minica, and it had no chance to escape from his whims. Our reporter Go Hatori had no chance to escape from the boss’ whims either, as he was called upon to photograph this latest overhaul, which saw our company car being transformed into…

▼ …a Japanese taxi!!!!

When Yoshio first floated the idea with Go, it sounded like it could be a eye-catching conversion. However, yet again, our downfall lay not in the ideas but the execution, because the end result wasn’t exactly the kind of taxi Go had envisioned.

Still, Yoshio seemed pretty proud of the results, but that could be because he’s been spending much of the summer at the SoraHouse, losing all sense of reality in the sweltering heat. Dismayed by Go’s reaction to his masterpiece, Yoshio whipped out his phone to show him what a great job he did of replicating the taxi he had in mind.

▼ “See?! Doesn’t it look just like a Fujikyu Shizuoka taxi?!?”

Well, he certainly had the main requirement to replicate the taxi, with the actual car-top lighting fixture, which Yoshio says he purchased at an event run by Seibu Railway around three years ago.

Yoshio picked it up for 9,800 yen — ten times more than the cost of the car itself — and though he had no idea what to do with it at the time, simply purchasing it because it looked cool, he now felt that the coming together of the sign and the Minica was like their perfect destiny.

Go had to admit that the logo’s stylised graphic of Mt Fuji looked really cool. If he saw that on a T-shirt, he’d buy it immediately.

However, on top of the Minica, which had taped sides to mimic the company’s cabs, it made the vehicle look like something you’d see on the streets at Halloween. Kind of like Tokyo’s Halloween taxi cabs with monster drivers…actually, better not remind the boss about that, or else he’ll make us all pile into the car for Halloween.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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