I remember the hot expression in primary school was “tazz” — as in “that’s a tazz bonie you’re trapping, my china!”, which meant the bicycle your friend was peddling possessed an innate desirability.
It never resurfaced in adolescent slang in the next three decades, which begs the question where Toyota came up with the name for its long-lived, budget hatchback, known until the late 1990s as the Conquest.
That Toyota chose an obscure late 1960s expression as the name for its most successful seller — it outsold every other make by two-to-one last month — says more about the South African psyche than it does about Toyota. Like the children of ageing hippies, South African car buyers long for emotional security blankets that remind them of their grandparents’ plaid-and-staid values, rather than whacked-out, tie-dyed consciousness expansion. And buying a Tazz is the ultimate expression of a security-first buying decision.
For the past eight months I’ve been tooling around in a post-office white Tazz 130, easing on the accelerator pedal to squeeze the last drop of juice out of every kilometre. I’ve shifted slowly to avoid the slight scratchiness that lurks in every Tazz gear mechanism and I’ve driven full-tilt over potholes, secure in the knowledge that Toyota has thrashed this car around its test track in the hills above the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast for about a billion kilometres since 1988.
There is an anonymity about driving a Tazz that is curiously special, especially if it’s a white one. The fact that so many other people find it special too bothers me not a jot. It just adds to my sense of being proved right. This is the thinking person’s car, the choice of those who realise that core values never really change, just like schoolyard expressions.
It doesn’t even bug me that in my complex in Sandton, a suburb known more for its Baby Booming Beemers, there are four white Tazzes almost identical to mine, apart from the registration numbers. In fact, it has become a game to me to pick mine out by looking at the slight upgrades that Toyota has so discreetly made over the years, being able to identify, say, a white 1999 Tazz from a late 2001 Tazz.
I can tell you that the wheels have changed three times. First they had square cooling slots and black hubcaps. Then, in a radical move, the hubcaps changed to silver to go with the rest of the rim colour. Finally, after a sweeping policy change at the highest managerial levels, the shape of the cooling slots changed. These slots have now morphed from square to oval and, in fact, the latest wheel reminds me of the rims fitted to my mother’s old Ford Popular from 1951, the car I learned to drive in. It shows the deep understanding that Toyota has of core values.
The nice thing about Tazzes being so similar, especially white ones, is if you screw up you can get spares dirt cheap. I scored a perfect replacement for my driver’s seat after I had inadvertently flicked my Camel Light ember out of the window before remembering that Tazzes require manual winding down of the windows.
Despite its Joe Citizen exterior, there is lots about the Tazz that adds mystery to the person who drives it. Is it a car of choice, or was it forced upon the driver through the decision of some budget-conscious fleet buyer? Did the owner buy it new or was it second-hand? Tazzes are so hardy, so bullet-proof, that they still look new when they are years old. Conversely nobody washes a Tazz from the day they buy it, so it looks kind of old when it’s virtually brand new. Sometimes they don’t even service it once the warranty’s run out, because it is simply indestructible.
“If it has oil in it and water in it, which it has because it’s a Tazz, then don’t worry about it,” a grizzled service expert told me. And he’s been working on them since they were introduced as second-generation Conquests 13 years ago.
If it has a full tank of petrol, you can hop in it in Joburg and arrive in Durban with enough juice to still cruise down to Ballito and back to your hotel in the city for a swim and a steak. You can trail beach sand into the interior, knowing that the carpets will not defluff no matter how many times you Hoover them. You can drive at full cruising speed over speed bumps, because all Toyota employees believe they are secretly Serge Damseaux, their rally champion role model, and that includes the engineers who developed the gas-charged shocks and the springs for even the most mundane of Toyota’s shopping appliqués.
Yes, this Tazz cuts across all boundaries, social, generational and physical. It is South Africa’s best-selling car and until all the chic-mobiles from France, Italy et al develop the kind of ruggedness that has made a Tazz idiot proof (careless smokers notwithstanding), it will remain so.
I wonder where they got the name from, though? I thought it was peculiar to my rather peculiar schoolyard.