Mexican Bugs

Painted bright yellow or green and white, the Beetle has been a firm favourite with Mexican taxi drivers, and after Volkswagen saw the gap in the Mexican market and started building cars in Puebla, they never really looked back.

The Beetle was cheap to buy and maintain, with new parts readily available. But in the five years since the factory there shut down, the Bug has become somewhat of an endangered species and parts are getting harder to find and more expensive. Then the government put the final nail in the coffin by setting a maximum 10-year age limit for all taxi cabs, making older Beetles illegal at a stroke. Their drivers are being offered an incentive of £800 to turn in their cars for scrap but that won't change the fact that a decade ago, 90 per cent of Mexico's 100,000 or so taxi cabs were Beetles and in a few years they will have vanished completely, replaced by the likes of the Nissan Sentra. Still, it was a good innings for the old Bug, and to all those Mexican drivers still using them - we salute you!