Introduced in 1956, the Checker A8 launched a series of taxis that loyally served America’s cities for nearly half a century. 

Created in the early ’20s by Chicago businessman Morris Markin, a Russian immigrant who made his first fortune as a clothier, Checker Motors was both an operator of taxi fleets and a taxicab manufacturer. The company’s history is a rich and complicated one, but for our purposes here the story begins in 1954, when the city of New York enacted new regulations that required Checker to redesign its taxi fleet. The resulting design, the 1956 Checker A8, was the first in a series of familiar taxis that served the cities of America for five decades.

Credit for the A8’s handsome but almost painfully plain bodywork often goes to designer Raymond Dietrich of LeBaron fame, who had an association with the company. However, Dietrich himself reportedly denied any role in the styling. More interesting than the bland sheet metal, perhaps, was its manner of construction: All the exterior panels were of heavy-gauge steel and bolted on for ease of repair—a clever and useful feature in a taxi. Front and rear bumpers were interchangeable.

The studio clay model above accurately captures the production A8 look, but shows a different grille than was eventually adopted. When the next model in the series, the four-headlamp A9, was introduced in 1958, the styling was extremely similar, but in fact all the outer stampings were changed.

In barber-shop legend, the Checker was built on a General Motors truck chassis, but in truth the platform was the company’s own design, with a robust (indeed, truck-like) X-braced ladder frame and independent front suspension that borrowed the 1954 Ford’s ball-joint geometry and lower control arms. A Dana-Spicer 44-series rear axle rode on leaf springs, combined with Wagner extreme-duty drum brakes, Ross steering, and a Warner three-speed manual transmission. An automatic would come later. The Checker was engineered to be as simple, sturdy, and serviceable as possible, and in the field, it proved to be nearly indestructible—zombie-like, as many fleet managers discovered.

The A8 was powered by the venerable Continental Red Seal F-226 engine, a basic six-cylinder flathead also found in industrial and agricultural equipment. (Kaiser-Frazer used an in-house variant of this powerplant.) An extra-cost OHV version with a crossflow head was later offered. When Continental abandoned the passenger-car business in 1964, Checker switched to Chevrolet engines of various types and displacements.

The standard A8 cabin layout offered a stark driver compartment and a gigantic rear seat and floor with two folding jump seats for additional passengers. Other configurations were available on order, including a sedan-ambulance. While the Checker A8 and its successors were designed for taxi fleet use, from the start the company tried to accommodate private customers with special orders and later, civilian-ized models including the Marathon and the Superba. Other variants included the Aerobus, a stretched-body airport limo.

The original Checker A8 gave way to the four-headlamp A9 in 1958, followed by a succession of models designated A10 through A12, continually updated but all based on the original 1956 architecture, and all sharing the familiar Checker look. The last Checker taxi rolled out of the Kalamazoo, Michigan factory in 1982, but somehow the company soldiered on for several decades as a maker of stampings for the Detroit automakers before it finally closed in 2009, a victim of the industry crash. The last Checker cab on regular duty in New York City was finally retired in 1999.