'Dominguito': the 1988 Mercedes still driving as a taxi in Gran Canaria after 7 million kilometres

In short: "Dominguito", a Mercedes-Benz W123 first registered in 1988, has been working non-stop as a taxi in San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria) for 35 years. It has covered 7.1 million kilometres —177 laps around the planet at the equator— and needed seven different engines to get there. It's the most extreme version of a question every taxi driver asks themselves at some point: how long does it pay to keep investing in the same car before replacing it?

The vehicle was bought by its first owner in 1986 and started driving under licence in 1988. Since 2006 it has been driven by Juan Rafael Santana, who covers the 04:00 to 12:00 shift; two other drivers split the rest of the day, so "Dominguito" barely stops rolling. According to Canarias7, the taxi still covers around 5,000 kilometres a week.

Seven engines to last 35 years

What stands out most isn't the total mileage, but what it has cost to keep it running. Santana puts it plainly in the report: "the first engine it came with was repaired three times, but we've already fitted seven engines." At this rate of use, each engine lasts around a million kilometres —about five years— before it needs replacing.

Even the odometer itself has needed a patch job: at 6 million kilometres it broke, and was replaced with one from a scrapyard that already showed 500,000 km on the clock. That's why the current reading runs ahead of the real mileage, estimated at that 7.1 million.

The question every taxi driver asks sooner or later

Almost no car reaches 7 million kilometres, but every taxi reaches a point where its owner has to decide: keep investing in maintenance, or change the vehicle? "Dominguito"'s answer has been clear —seven engines later, it's still on the road— but it's not the only possible answer, nor the right one for every case.

What separates a good decision from a bad one isn't gut feeling or attachment to the car —even though this taxi has earned it— it's the numbers: how much each kilometre you drive actually costs, adding up fuel, servicing, tyres and big repairs like an engine. Once that cost per kilometre starts to exceed what a payment on a new or used car would come to, the scale tips towards replacing it.

How to make that decision with data, not by feel

The usual problem is that almost nobody tracks that calculation day to day. The garage invoice gets noted down when it stings, it isn't compared against the kilometres driven, and in the end the decision to replace the car is made on a hunch —"this thing can't take much more"— rather than on figures. The maintenance costs (servicing, tyres, engine work) are precisely the ones that weigh most on real long-term profit, and the ones least consistently recorded.

In Taxio, every garage expense is logged with its amount, date and category, alongside the kilometres and earnings of each shift. With that, at any moment you can see your real cost per kilometre and compare it with what the car is bringing in, instead of waiting for an engine to decide for you. If you manage several vehicles, that same comparison broken down by car is what tells you which one needs replacing first and which one is still worth keeping.

"Dominguito" will probably keep circling the globe for a few more years. But most taxi drivers don't need to break a record: they need to know, with data rather than by feel, when the car they have stops being the one that best suits them.