1967 Austin FX4 London Taxi Cab

A London taxi cab is not a car most shops ever see, let alone work on, and this 1967 Austin FX4 is a genuine one, right down to the upright grille, the cavernous rear cabin, and the four-speed manual gearbox with no synchromesh on first gear. Its owners came to Crown with a clear brief: keep it a real cab, but make it something they could actually drive day to day, reliably, without hunting for parts for an engine that has not been common on this continent in decades.

That meant an engine swap, and the original Austin 2.2 liter four-cylinder, rated at a modest 68 horsepower from the factory, came out to make room for a Ford 2.3 liter EcoBoost engine, chosen specifically for being close enough in size and weight to fit the FX4’s engine bay without reworking the whole car around it. Everything the swap touched was custom, since nothing about mating a modern EcoBoost to a 1967 British taxi is a bolt-in job: engine mounts fabricated to fit the original chassis, a new driveshaft built to match, a custom transmission tunnel and shifter, and a complete wiring harness rebuilt from the original layout to run modern engine management alongside the cab’s existing systems.

True to its owners’ wishes, the swap stopped exactly where they wanted it to. The original steering system stays as built, no power assist added. The drum brakes at all four corners stay as built too. No air conditioning, no upgraded sound system, no changes for the sake of changing them. The fuel system was upgraded to support modern electronic fuel injection, and the cooling system was updated with an aluminum radiator and electric fans, but those changes exist to serve the new engine, not to modernize the car beyond what its owners asked for.

The result, once finished, will be a car few people have ever ridden in outside of London itself, one that starts every time, drives every day if its owners want it to, and still looks and feels exactly like the taxi it always was.