Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times  Final decisions about New Yorkâs next taxi, the Nissan NV 200, came after months of discussions and research. A prototype, above, arrived Saturday.  LA JOLLA, Calif. — The goateed French designer and the bespectacled New York City bureaucrat had been at it for about 20 minutes now, politely arguing about the pros and cons of a particular style of plastic sheet.  “It’s more modern,” said the Frenchman, speaking from inside a life-size mockup of a yellow minivan, parked, somewhat incongruously, in an outdoor Zen garden-cum-design studio on the outskirts of this oceanside village. “Mmm,” said his client, David S. Yassky, the taxi commissioner of New York City. “I’m just not comfortable with that.”  The subject of this debate was a humdrum object more commonly perceived as a fogged-up, scratchiti-marred eyesore: the plastic partition separating the front and rear seats of a yellow cab.  But Mr. Yassky and the designer, Francois Farion of Nissan, were in the midst of rethinking every element of New York’s next taxicab, and when a once-in-a-lifetime chance comes along, no detail can be overlooked.  As the winner of the Taxi of Tomorrow contest, Nissan secured a 10-year contract, worth an estimated $1 billion in sales, to be the sole manufacturer of New York City’s 13,000 cabs. In return, the company pledged to create a bespoke taxicab: the first car since the Checker to be designed nearly from the ground up for the sole purpose of carrying millions of tourists, businesspeople and intoxicated clubgoers around the rough-and-tumble streets of New York City. (The Ford Crown Victoria and other taxis were typically retrofitted for the job.)  Starting in late 2013, medallion owners will be required by the Taxi and Limousine Commission to buy the Nissan NV 200, which is expected to cost about $29,000, as they retire their existing cabs. The Nissans will be phased in over three to five years, with exceptions for wheelchair-accessible cabs.  The NV 200 will be officially unveiled on Tuesday ahead of the New York auto show. But the final decisions happened here, in a series of meetings in December behind the black tinted windows of Nissan’s sleek, glass-and-concrete American design headquarters.  In a modernist planning room with a floor-to-ceiling screen reminiscent of the film “Minority Report,” Nissan designers and engineers met with a delegation from the Bloomberg administration to iron out everything from the precise hue of yellow body paint to whether the backseat temperature control units would tick up by one degree or two at a time.  “This is not just painting another car yellow,” said Megan Canning, deputy director of the Design Trust for Public Space and a member of the city contingent. A reporter from The New York Times was allowed to sit in on the proceedings, which followed months of discussions and research.  It is rare for a global corporation like Nissan, which is accustomed to selling its vehicles on multiple continents, to design a car for a single metropolitan market, and from the start, the company, whose American headquarters are in Tennessee, lacked Big Apple expertise. Mr. Farion, who went to Nissan from Peugeot, observed that the Taxi of Tomorrow was being overseen by a French designer at a studio in California on behalf of a Japanese company: “We have to get in a New York mood, in a not-particularly New York atmosphere.”  To help, the company performed its own taxi autopsy, dismantling retired cabs to find the internal injuries that years of taxi service can bring. The gruesome results, presented to Mr. Yassky’s team, included rusted-over suspensions and broken underbodies. Shift knobs had been rubbed down to a nub.  The company also sent scouts to determine the current conditions in New York. The results were similarly grim. “The state of materials in the cab — the state of the partition, the vinyl — it’s torn and dirty,” said Mr. Farion, who spent a month hailing cabs at all hours of the day. “Being French, I’m not germophobic in the least, but it was a very urban and derelict environment that we wanted to change.”  The session began with a review by Steve Monk, a Nissan director of vehicle testing, of the particular challenges faced by cars that spend 24 hours a day trundling along New York’s distinctly pockmarked streets.  A chart was presented that compared the wear and tear on New York City taxis with cars in the rest of the world. Manhattan roads, it turns out, are about four times rougher than the American average, and only third-world countries in South America and Africa beat up their cars more.  “It’s not like you’ve got much deeper potholes than the worst part of the world,” Mr. Monk told the New Yorkers, prompting some laughter. “They’re normal potholes that you drive over much more frequently in a short period of time.”  Next up was the choosing of the horns. The city, in announcing the Taxi of Tomorrow, heralded a “low annoyance” horn that would be gentler than the current honk, which one Nissan executive described as “a very guttural scream kind of a situation.”
Stick with the traditional partition? What color should the meter cover be? At planning meetings for the Taxi of Tomorrow, no detail was too banal to debate.