Merci Dix
In Morocco people don’t Uber, instead they pile into Grand Taxis - battered but colourful old diesel Mercedes that are North Africa’s answer to Cuba’s vintage cars

Words by John Silcox
Photography by Sam Christmas

THIS STORY APPEARED IN GEOGRAPHICAL, BBC.COM, READER’S DIGEST & OCTANE

SUNRISE IN ESSAOUIRA 

The sun is still hiding behind weathered stone ramparts high above the old Moroccan port of Essaouira, but already day-to-day business is well underway at the small city’s bustling ‘Place des Grand Taxis’. Drivers are de-misting cracked windscreens with filthy wads of old newspaper, oil-covered mechanics are coaxing weary engines back to life through clouds of thick blue smoke. Long-distance travellers are huddled together, waiting in small groups for a ride, their faces concealed from the cold by hooded woollen cloaks called Djellabas. 

Everyone is eager to get on the road early and escape the unrelenting heat of the day, which makes sitting in a cramped vehicle - with up to six passengers, their luggage, and driver - unbearable. So, most eyes track the chief broker who busily manages operations from a prominent position next to the entrance of the whitewash-walled compound, where a fleet of 30-odd sky-blue cars are parked. 

At regular intervals he loudly barks orders at both drivers and passengers, skilfully orchestrating proceedings using a rectangular piece of card on which he scores a long list of numbers, controlling every vehicle coming in and out of this organised chaos. 

Just before 8am, a particularly old taxi appears in a veil of dust, bouncing off the pot-holed road and mounting the low kerb that leads to the transport hub. After nonchalantly avoiding collision with an orange vendor’s cart and a skinny stray dog, it crawls past the broker and finds a space at the back of the rank. Behind the wheel sits Hassan Mesfar a well-known and much-loved character in the neighbourhood, who is instantly recognisable by the car he drives: a 1974 Mercedes ‘Stroke 8’.

In the UK such a vehicle would belong to a motor museum but in Morocco it’s just another rolling ruin. Still this one boasts the dubious honour of being the oldest taxi in Essaouira but not by much, as it shares the tarmac with plenty of other battered and bruised diesel vehicles, long due retirement. 

Indeed, in this city like all over the kingdom, many Mercedes 240Ds from the 1970s and 80s have spent their twilight years in the sun, after being shipped over when deemed too old for the European market. Here they are woven into the fabric of society, providing an essential long-distance travel link for locals as well as a colourful snapshot for tourists, much like the old American cars in Cuba. 

But not for much longer, as the Moroccan government is keen to rid them from the country’s roads. In 2014, it launched an incentive scheme offering Grand Taxi drivers 80,000 Diram (Åí6.5K) to scrap their old vehicles. So far, more than 56 per cent of the 45,000 grand taxis in service have been updated thanks to this programme something the government aims to increase to 100 per cent by 2023. 

“It’s the end of an era,” says Mesfar, ruefully, as he sits down to enjoy a coffee at his regular spot. Last night he only got back from his journey late and as is customary with the Grand Taxis first-in first-out system, he won’t be leaving until later in the day. “The government is offering us money to update our cars for shiny new Dacias but for me they’re not the same as my old Mercedes. It’s the best car I have ever driven - so solid, so reliable, so comfortable - and never lets me down. That’s why around here we call them ‘Merci dix’.” 

In Moroccan French this literally translates as ‘thanks times ten’ but there’s also a play on words with the local pronunciation of Mercedes /Meərsidɪs/. Hassan, who like many taxi drivers is a theatrical conversationalist, says it by pursing his lips, lifting his chin and narrowing his dark eyes as if squinting into bright light. He then draws out the ‘r’ by pulling back his seasoned face into a grin, rattling through the other syllables and pushing out the final ‘s’ through near-closed teeth. All the while, jiggling his head and raising his hands in mock praise. It’s quite the performance. 

LE GRAND TAXI 

To understand the impact of this scheme on a national scale, it’s important to understand the wider role of taxis in Morocco. In a country of 36 million people there are only 2.8 million registered cars: so only one car per 11 Moroccans. To put this in perspective nearby Spain, with a population of roughly 10 million more, has more than 24 million vehicles on the road. And without rail or bus providing a well-developed or affordable solution to the masses, Grand Taxis are the leading long-distance transport solution. 

“Le Grand Taxi is the backbone of Morocco,” says Mesfar, proudly emphasising the essential role he and his co-workers deliver. “Public transportation is next to inexistent, there is only one train line and that’s up north. If you want to get to another city you can take the bus, but departures are irregular, there are frequent accidents and its very slow and it only takes you to the big cities. That’s why people like to take Grand Taxis - they’re nice and quick.” 

Their popularity can’t be debated here in Essaouira. Since the small hours of the morning we have watched drivers demisting windscreens with filthy wads of old newspaper, oil-covered mechanics coaxing weary engines back to life and long-distance travellers huddling together, waiting in small groups for a ride. They are all eager to get on the road early and escape the unrelenting heat of the day, which makes sitting in a cramped vehicle - with up to six passengers, luggage and driver - absolutely unbearable.  

The ‘Place des Grand Taxis’ is more than a simple taxi rank: it’s a main transport hub and each city in the country has one. A chief broker, usually found in a prominent position surrounded by assistants, orchestrates operations. Travellers going to a particular city up north are ushered into one taxi, those going south into another and so forth. Then when all the seats in a car are taken, it can leave on its journey. Generally speaking, the further the destination, the earlier the departure - as most drivers like to return to their home base each night despite travelling upwards of 1000km per day but this isn’t always possible. 

“Look at the green taxi parked over there,” says Mesfar. “That’s stayed overnight from Taroudant [a city to the West of Essaouira] and that one over there is from Rabat as it’s white. Each city in Morocco has its own taxi colour scheme that makes it easy to spot.” 

Essaouria boasts a unique shade of blue that originally came from crushed seashells. Nearly everything in the city has been painted with it: from horse drawn carriages, to people’s front doors - even the Petit Taxis. This last point is unusual as most other Moroccan cities chose different colours to differentiate Petit Taxis, which are smaller cars (usually French hatchbacks): only allowed to take a maximum of two passengers on much shorter rides within the urban perimeter.  

AFRICA: THE WORLD’S SCRAPYARD  

The love affair between the German automotive brand and the North African Kingdom dates back to the earliest days of the automobile. In 1892, the Moroccan Sultan Hassan 1st bought the first car ever made by Daimler (the company that owns Mercedes-Benz) and this royal endorsement has continued throughout history. The current king Mohammed VI still uses a unique Mercedes Benz 600, passed down from his father, for state functions.  

“In the 1980s Africa started to experience an influx of second-hand Mercedes cars,” says Flavien Neuvy an economist specialising in the African automotive industry. “Moroccan taxi drivers simply started catching on to what cab owners in Europe had understood: diesel Mercedes were built to last.” 

Mesfar’s Mercedes W114 ‘Stroke 8’ model was a game-changer for the Stuttgart-based manufacturer and 1.9 million rolled off the line during its eight years of production. It’s successor, the W123, appeared in 1976 and even more were produced with 2.9 million of these cars being built in the nine years that followed. 

Back in the 1970s and 1980s the average age of cars in Europe was less than seven-years-old. So millions of robust and reliable Mercedes were soon swapped for newer cars by their original owners and sold on the used car market. Finally when deemed too old for the European buyers they were picked up at discounted rates by exporters and shipped to emerging countries, with Africa being the favourite destination.  

In 2000, more than 70 per cent of all cars imported into Morocco were more than five years old, including many old Mercedes, which have enjoyed incredible longevity thanks to their robust mechanics, simple maintenance requirements and an abundance of salvaged spare parts. It was estimated 35,000 W123 240Ds alone were still on Moroccan roads in 2011, more than 30 years after the last car rolled off production lines.  

“Africa is a hotbed of mechanical resourcefulness,” says Neuvy. “Everything has a value, even if we’d deem it rubbish in Europe. When things break, people always a way to fix them. So Moroccan Taxi drivers have many tricks up their sleeves to keep their vehicles on the road.” 

One popular trick involves filling the boot with stones to limp home after breaking a prop shaft. The additional weight on the rear axle stabilises things so you can keep the car on the road. 

W123 AHEAD OF ITS TIME 

For Mark Cosovich, owner of speciality Mercedes garage W123 World and author of Mercedes-Benz W123: the Finest Saloon Car of the 20th Century? it’s no surprise so many of these cars are still on Moroccan roads.  

“The Mercedes-Benz W123 was built for the future, being quite literally miles ahead of its time,” he says. “It boasted cutting-edge technology such as disk brakes, fuel injection and air conditioning, putting it easily a generation in front of anything else in the 1970s. Back then if you bought a new Jaguar, you couldn’t get fuel injection, nor could you get it in a Rolls Royce, and apart from Peugeot, who were in a totally different segment, no other main brand was offering diesel units.” 

In terms of safety, the company from Stuttgart was also leading the field, using superb engineering abilities to produce vehicles of structural integrity the world had not yet seen. The W123 boasted a collapsible steering column, an ultra-rigid passenger compartment as well front and rear crumple zones protecting passengers from impacts on all fronts. Optional airbags and ABS were also available from the early 1980s.  

All this came at a cost, however. Not only were these vehicles rather pricey to buy at the time, but the Germans also spent record amounts of money developing this model. 

“It was a car built where the engineers got the say, not the accountants,” Cosovich explains. “The research and development budget for this car was colossal, bigger than anything we’ve seen before or since and financed by profits from the commercial vehicle department. Nothing was left to chance or rushed – each tiny element was considered and calculated. For example, they even built a robotic leg, clothed in trousers and a leather shoe to do durability testing on the footwell carpet – simulating someone getting in and out of the car millions of times. It’s crazy doing that in 1972, it was like something out of Doctor Who.” 

This careful development ethos defined the brands for decades and if you compare successive Mercedes models, especially W114, W115, W123 and W124, the evolution of design language is rather conservative. Under the stewardship of legendary Italian designer Bruno Sacco principles were carefully updated following “vertical affinity”. And it’s precisely this classic look that is helping these cars come back into fashion now. The W123 in particular is enjoying somewhat of a revival among trend-setters – even pop singer and Oscar-winning actress Lady Gaga drives one. 

CLEARING THE AIR 

While we don’t all have the same budgets a Hollywood celebrity, most Westerners have the luxury of choosing between buying a new car or a second-hand vehicle, but the same can’t be said for North African drivers. While European drivers have enjoyed many generations of cleaner, more efficient vehicles; Moroccans have been suffering from increasingly bad air pollution. According to the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, mortality due to air pollution in the country has increased by 50 per cent since 1997. Vehicle emissions are the most significant source of air pollution in Moroccan urban centres, accounting for nearly 60 per cent in total. 

“Some developing countries have some pretty hideous pollution problems in their cities,” says Mike Berners-Lee. “With old Diesel engines there are two types of pollution. The type of pollution that clogs up your lungs and kills you and passers-by with particulates; and then there’s carbon emissions which affect climate change. In the U.K alone, 40,000 people per year dies of this first kind of pollution per year, so it’s definitely something that needs to be taken seriously.” 

The Moroccan government’s response has been to implement a series of measures to improve matters. In 2010 they banned the import of all cars more than five years old as well as increasing tax duties on the sale of second-hand vehicles. Then in 2014, they brought in the first cash incentive scheme aimed at Grand Taxi drivers.  

So far, the scheme hasn’t quite had the desired reach with poor levels of uptake at its launch and then multiple deadline extensions for missing ambitious old car renewal targets ever since. Critics also point at the government having other motivations for subsidising new car purchases. Indeed in recent years, the country has invested heavily to develop extensive automobile production facilities. 

The North African kingdom is set to become one of the world’s big players in the automotive sector and its car industry is poised to be worth approximately $14 billion within the next five years. As of 2019, automotive represented nearly 30 per cent of the country’s exports and already one in five new car imports into Europe comes from Morocco. 

French manufacturer Renault is historically linked with the territory and benefits from support from the Moroccan government, operating two plants in the North of the country. Production at these sites includes the seven-seater Dacia Lodgy, which is now the most commonly bought taxi in the country representing one in every two new sales.  

“From an embodied carbon perspective however, keeping these old Mercedes on the road is actually better than replacing them with new ones,” argues Berners-Lee. “People often forget that producing new vehicles generates a lot of unseen carbon emissions, even though the end product spits out less from its tailpipe. So it’s important we learn a lesson here about our attitude to new efficient vehicles. The direct savings from the previous model must be significant enough to warrant renewal, otherwise we are simply offsetting the problem to a different part of the vehicle’s life-cycle.” 

Regardless of all this, for now back in Essaouira, as far as Hasan Mesfar is concerned, it’s going to take more than a few thousand Diram and a shiny new car to make the veteran driver change his ways.  

“I’m too old for anything new anyways,” he says. “I’ll be retiring in a few years so it would be a waste of money to upgrade. I also don’t think my customers would like it and for me, it wouldn’t be the same job without my Mercedes. We’ve travelled so far, experienced so much and been on unforgettable adventures. It’s only fair we reach the end of the road together.”