Robert De Niro played Travis Bickle in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver, and he apparently went so far as to obtain a real New York City taxi license, spending a month driving a cab around Manhattan to prepare for the role (reportedly recognized by just one passenger). His cab of choice? A Checker A11 taxicab, the commercial cousin of this 1972 Checker Marathon, currently up for sale in Madison, Alabama, here on Facebook Marketplace for $20,000. A warm thank you to zappenduster for the tip.
The Checker was never intended to be fashionable. Built by Checker Motors Corporation in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the first Checker appeared in 1922, and the now-familiar design of our featured car debuted in 1956. It remained largely unchanged until production ended in 1982, an astonishing 26-year run for essentially the same automobile. Taxi and fleet operators were Checker’s bread and butter, and they cared about durability, low operating costs, and passenger room, not annual styling changes. The consumer-focused Marathon arrived in 1961 and was, for all intents and purposes, the same car, just sold to individuals who apparently didn’t mind driving something that looked like a New York City taxicab.
Civilian Checkers were always relatively rare, and the company never developed the dealer network needed to support mass-market sales. Annual production typically ran well under 10,000 cars, including fleet sales, with private buyers accounting for only a small fraction of the total. By 1972, Checkers came with Chevrolet running gear, either a 250 cubic-inch inline-six or a 350 V8, and from the photos, it’s clear our featured car has the eight-cylinder. The seller claims a full restoration with upgrades, which appear to include a repaint in a somewhat chocolatey brown, leather bench seating, a contemporary gauge setup, air conditioning, power accessories, and a more modern stereo. It has an ignition switch on the dash, leaving a hole on the GM steering column where the ignition switch used to be. A replacement collar might tidy that up nicely.
The 350 would have given you around 165 horsepower, pushing about 3800 pounds of Checker, and a 1968 Road & Track test of an earlier V8-powered Marathon recorded a pretty leisurely 13.9-second run to 60 mph and a top speed of 103 mph, although the later 350 should have accelerated a little better. I suppose the thinking was that while you wouldn’t outrun anybody, you probably wouldn’t break down, either. By 1982, Checker was building only about 2,000 cars annually, with civilian Marathons accounting for just a handful of those. After automobile production ended, the company continued manufacturing parts for other automakers before eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2009. With such low production numbers, this is a genuinely rare automobile, despite being one of the most recognizable cars of the second half of the 20th century. Any interest in picking up this piece of history?
You meet the nicest people in a Checker.