MUMBAI: For decades since 1964 when they first premiered on streets, visualising Mumbai's landscape would have been impossible without the city's 'Premier Padmini' famous cabs, public transportation, colloquially called 'kaali-peeli,' (Black and Yellow due to its distinct two colours) which was a vital component of daily life for the citizens more so for those from the Mumbai City districts. 

This journey formally came to an end last week, with the transport department official saying that the last Premier Padmini registered as a black-and-yellow taxi at the Tardeo RTO, in the island city of Mumbai, on October 29, 2003 with an age limit of 20 years, Mumbai officially won’t have a Premier Padmini taxi after this. 

According to AL Quadros, general secretary of the Mumbai Taximens Union, the journey of Premier Padmini manufactured by Premier Automobile Limit (PAL) as a taxi started in 1964 with the model ‘Fiat-1100 Delight’, a powerful 1200-cc car with a steering-mounted gear shifter and was called by locals as ‘dukkar Fiat’ due to a short boot.

In the 1970s, the PAL rebranded the car as 'Premier President' and subsequently as 'Premier Padmini' after the legendary Indian queen Padmini and came with a bigger boot. The production of the car stopped in 2001 and the cars were slowly replaced by new-age cars like Hyundai's Santro.

In 2009 Hyundai Motors India Limited handed over the first 30 cars to Mumbai Taxi Union in Mumbai to be run as taxis in the city, and eventually, nearly 50,000 black and yellow taxis in Mumbai were replaced by these new vehicles. 

Industrialist Anand Mahindra wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) along with a picture of the cab, “From today, the iconic Premier Padmini Taxi vanishes from Mumbai’s roads. They were clunkers, uncomfortable, unreliable, noisy. Not much baggage capacity either. But for people of my vintage, they carried tons of memories. And they did their job of getting us from point A to point B. Goodbye and alvida, kaali-peeli taxis. Thank you for the good times…"