Not My Driver - Television Tropes & Idioms

Psmith: Sherlock Holmes was right. You may remember that he advised Doctor Watson never to take the first cab, or the second. He should have gone further, and urged him not to take cabs at all. Walking is far healthier.
Mr. Parker: You'll find it so.

— Psmith, Journalist

Out of all the cabs in all the city, the Hero, his significant other, or another important person will invariably get on the one that the villain is driving. If they're particularly alert they might notice they aren't headed to the park before the villain reveals himself and uses Knockout Gas or locks all the doors from the front of the vehicle. (They never notice before they enter the car.)

As anyone who lives in a large metropolitan area can attest, cabbies and people looking for a taxi are aggressive and a dime a dozen; so the odds of a Villain or his Evil Minions actually catching their target without another cab swerving in ahead of them, or having a pushy fare cut in front of the victim, are particularly slim. This is also ignoring the possibility of the intended target biking, busing, taking the subway, metro, getting a friend to pick them up, or just plain walking.

This trope is named for the less common but more iconic scene where the target's personal driver is replaced by the villain, leading to a "You're Not My Driver" quickly followed by a Bond One-Liner from the impostor and some knockout gas or a gun to the face. It often comes with the added implication that the poor driver is laying face down in a ditch somewhere. This method is more believable than Taxi-napping a victim, since the target invariably comes to the villain. It is, however, slightly odd that nobody ever notices this until after they're in the car.

This trope is not necessarily limited to taxis and limos either, but also planes, boats, and even zeppelins. A particularly nasty variation has an ambulance full of apparent paramedics turn up who are actually bad guys there to finish off the survivors.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime and Manga

In Canaan, not only do the main characters find probably the only Japanese-speaking cabbie in Shanghai, but he becomes a recurring character. Literally every time they need a car, the same exact cabbie miraculously happens to be nearby.
The heroine in Ten Yori Mo, Hoshi Yori Mo falls for one of these. Justified because she only just moved in with a rich family and wouldn't know all their drivers yet. What wasn't justified was why the driver didn't just pop her in the car right there before she caught on.
In Death Note, Mello kidnaps Sayu and demands the Japanese task force hand over the notebook as ransom. The task force members travel to Los Angeles by separate planes, but at Narita Airport Soichiro Yagami is forced to board flight SE333, where The Mafia is waiting for him.

Comic Books

Huge Lampshade Hanging the Miracleman story "Spy Story" by Neil Gaiman, where a paranoid secret agent goes through the following tortuous logic:
You never take the first cab that comes along. A rookie knows that. And if a rookie knows that, then the opposition knows that too. Fine. So you never take the second cab that comes along. Which leaves the first cab or the third cab. But you never take the first cab that comes along. Which means it's the third cab. But they'll have thought of that, so you ignore the first three cabs. Which is just what they'll be expecting you to do, so they'll have their man in the fourth cab. Which means... Which means...
She then gives up and takes the first cab that comes along. It's driven by another spy, of course, but then so are all the cabs in the city.
In an issue of Suicide Squad, Black Orchid impersonated bad guy William Heller's chauffeur. She does it not to kidnap him, however, but so she can eavesdrop on conversations between him and his advisers. She let the real driver out of the trunk after completing her mission, and threatened him into keeping quiet about having been kidnapped and replaced.
Tintin In America has our hero get into a cab driven by one of the gangsters he's after. He escapes and gets into a police car, but that one is smashed by accomplices in a muscle car.
- Later, he calls the police after another assassination attempt, but his phone line is hijacked and the police car turns out also driven by gangsters.
Wolverine pulled this on a cocky young mob boss who threatened to kill a little girl and her father if Wolverine didn't kill a witness under Federal protection for him (obviously Wolverine didn't go through with it). When the mob boss went for the hidden gun in his limo Wolverine just told him not to embarrass himself. Fredo, realizing he has absolutely no chance of overpowering Wolverine, relents.
Variant occurs in the Catwoman tie-in to No Man's Land. Selina hijacks a military helicopter after replacing one of the pilots, and her copilot doesn't realize this until she removes her helmet.
Batman once impersonated the limo driver of a woman who nearly got away with two murders by playing on the Riddler's ego. She only noticed something was amiss when she realized the limo wasn't going to the airport. (Detective Comics #822)
An issue of Green Arrow featured a scene where the female vigilante Thorn used a taxi cab in order to stalk a criminal she was planing to kidnap. The real driver is shown tied up in the back seat with his mouth taped shut, apparently having been knocked out by Thorn.

Film

In Spider-Man 3, Eddie Brock kidnaps Mary Jane this way.
In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the plane Indy, Short Round, and Willie board to escape Shanghai mobster Lao Che is owned by Lao Che, so he promptly signals the pilots to parachute out and let the plane crash.
- In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Brody insists on going with the people the embassy send to pick him up, despite his local guide insisting that their story makes no sense and they are obviously German spies. They are.
Subverted by James Bond in Dr. No, where a villain claims the embassy sent him. Bond covertly phones the embassy to find out the truth, and properly deals with the villain.
- However, in the later Roger Moore Bond film Live and Let Die, Bond falls for this trick (in a taxi this time), though pretty much everyone in the city is in the pay of the Big Bad. Then he falls for it again, with the same driver.
  - In all fairness, we are talking about Live and Let Die.
- The Roger Moore Bond has also had Blofeld send a phony helicopter to pick him up at the opening of For Your Eyes Only. Blofeld then kills the fake pilot and takes radio control so he can finish 007 off personally. Well, try to anyway.
Poked fun at in What's Up, Tiger Lily?, a Gag Dub of a Japanese spy movie. The main characters walk into a random cab and promptly tell the driver they want to be kidnapped. He of course, obliges, seeing as how this was a Not My Driver scene in the original dub of the movie.
1998's Godzilla featured a Taxi-napping of Matthew Broderick by Jean Reno.
- Subverted in that he's actually the good guy.
A slight variation from Anastasia, where Dmitri takes over for the Dowager Empress's driver, forcing her to see Anya. The variation here is that Dmitri is the hero, and simply trying to make amends for his earlier deception. The Stock Phrase is also inverted: Instead of the Dowager saying the phrase, Dmitri turns around and says "I'm not [your driver]!"
The first act of Requiem for a Dream ends with Marlon Wayans making a deal with some black drug kingpins. The partition slides down and Wayans marvels that they have a white driver, only for bullets to start flying; the driver was a hitman for an Italian cartel.
In the first X-Men movie, Mystique and Toad kidnap Senator Kelly by piloting his helicopter to Magneto's island. Somewhat justified: as Mystique can shapeshift to look like anyone at all, she murders and impersonates the senator's real staff.
Japanese tokusatsu example: in Kamen Rider The First, the Shocker operative Spider poses as a cabdriver for the explicit purpose of finding his victims and, when necessary, taking them somewhere secluded to dispose of them.
The classic British gangster film The Long Good Friday ends with the main character and his mistress entering a dummy vehicle and being 'taken for a ride' by his enemies.
Played Straight in The Game, when Nicholas finds out that the cab he gets on the street is owned by CRS.
An example of the hero (or should I say Villain Protagonist) using this technique occurs in Assassins (1995). Robert Rath, having lost track of rival contract killer Miguel Bain, steals a cab and, upon hearing a radio call about a priest in the area Bain was last seen asking to be taken to the airport, realizes that's his man. Rath intends to shoot Bain when he gets out of the car (as there's a sheet of bulletproof glass between them) but at the last minute Bain sees the driver's ID card is missing and realizes who Rath is, leading to Gunpoint Banter through the glass.
Another heroic example occurs in Undercover Blues, where Jeff Blue stops a bank robbery in progress by booby-trapping their getaway minivan and replacing their getaway driver with himself. Lampshaded when he says, "No one ever looks at the driver."
In Scrooged, the Ghost of Christmas Past is a taxi driver. He solves the "aggressive real taxi cutting in" problem by aggressively cutting in himself. Crunch.
In One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing, Lord Southmere is kidnapped by the Chinese. He realizes what's happened, but can't do anything about it because they're being followed by another car full of the driver's colleagues.
In Undercover Brother, Mr. Feather kidnaps James Brown using this technique. "James Brown" is actually Undercover Brother wearing a Latex Perfection mask.
Parodied in The Third Man.
Done in Death to Smoochy. This time, the passenger does not realize who he is (not until much later in the film), even though the driver's dialogue is incredibly Subtext-filled.
In Life is Beautiful the protagonist does this to try to win the heart of the woman he loves.
In The Art Of War, this happens at the end with the film's Big Bad, after the main character informs the Chinese that she had their ambassador assassinated. She realizes they're not going to the airport right before the "driver" turns around and shoots her.
In The Whole Nine Yards, Oz plans to take Jimmy to a museum in order to ensure the latter doesn't try to kill him, while the women go to the bank. He hails a cab that is waiting across the street. On the way, Jimmy lets him know they're not going to the museum, at which point the driver window is opened, revealing Frankie Figgs.
In Eraser, the Big Bads are leaving the courthouse in a limo, talking about the apparent deaths of the protagonists, only to realize that neither of them is responsible for the car bomb. They suddenly stop at train tracks, and the doors lock. The driver runs away, revealing him to be Johnny, a friend of Kruger's. They then get a call from Kruger, who faked his and the girl's deaths. After saying his catch-phrase ("You've just been erased."), he watches as they "catch a train".
In Red, the Vice-President and his Secret Service guards get in a car while under fire. Cooper tries to warn them, but they don't listen. Then one guard is knocked out when the limo stops abruptly, and the other is tazered by the driver, who is Moses. The VP then gets the same treatment.
In the first dream level of Inception the protagonists kidnap Fischer this way. Possibly justified in that they designed the place, so they could make sure theirs was the only cab available.
As listed under Literature, this is how the bad guy in The Bone Collector catches his victims.

Literature

Miles Vorkosigan is nearly kidnapped in this manner in the Barrayar series. He avoids it because he is a professional paranoid. (Then again, since paranoia is defined as the irrational fear that they're out to get you, perhaps 'paranoid' is the wrong word.)
Generally a common trope in spy novels. In Sky Masters by Dale Brown, the US Ambassador to ASEAN gets a message from a Filipino politician this way.
In Orson Scott Card's Shadow Puppets, Bean and Petra, currently on the run from Achilles, are going to take separate cabs to the airport, to different locations. Bean is suspicious of the first two cabs in line, so he puts Petra into the third cab. He then gets into the first cab himself, and barely avoids being killed by the driver, one of Achilles' agents. After escaping, he learns that Petra's driver is an agent for one of their allies.
- Earlier, in Shadow Of The Hegemon, Petra is rescued from Achilles by a well-meaning bunch of men who don't believe her when she argues that it is probable that Achilles is driving their getaway car as they speak. As soon as she starts to convince them, Achilles, who was in fact driving just as Petra guessed, opens the division and kills all her rescuers.
In The Puppet Masters, the protagonist spent a little time being controlled by one of the aliens. His old boss recaptured and freed him using this tactic. Although the boss is acting as a fellow passenger rather than the driver.
In the Discworld novel Making Money, Loveable Rogue Moist von Lipwig, despite knowing he has powerful enemies, gets into the first hansom cab that comes along, only to jump out the opposite door running like hell when it turns out to be a Honey Trap. Colon and Nobby are nearby to comment on his uncharacteristic Genre Blindness. Similarly, earlier in the book, he got into an unmarked black coach, on the assumption it was the Patrician's. It wasn't.
In Michael Almereyda's 2000 version of Hamlet, set in corporate Manhattan, Hamlet takes the place of Claudius's chauffeur, intending to kill him. Claudius does his soliloquy about not being able to pray, so Hamlet decides not to kill him.
In Jeffrey Deaver's The Bone Collector the killer catches exactly the two people he wants dead in his cab, where the doors in the back seat won't open from the inside.
In Charles Stross's Halting State, most of the cabs in 2017 are driven by remote control from call centres. The bad guys hack into the system to take control of the cab the main characters are in and crash it.
Inverted in the first Able Team novel (a Mack Bolan/Executioner spin-off) when the team is tracking a suspect in New York City with the help of federal agents. When he jumps into a cab Lyons shouts for them to get the cab's number, only to be told not to worry — the suspect has accidentally flagged down a fed disguised as a cabbie.
Justified in The Religion War by Scott Adams, where the protagonist's extraordinary pattern spotting abilities enable him to deliberately choose the one cab driver who is actually a terrorist
In The Menacers by Donald Hamilton, government assassin and protagonist Matt Helm and a Girl Who Knows Too Much get into a cab, only for the cab driver to reveal himself as a known KGB agent and the knockout gas jets to start hissing. And then massively subverted when Helm goes "My orders are to kill her rather than let the enemy get what she knows... but who the hell actually uses something as melodramatic and uncertain as knockout gas jets instead of just shooting me? They want me to have enough time to kill her before I pass out. Why?" It turns out that the KGB had set up the aforementioned girl as a patsy in the first place, and what they really wanted was an American agent caught red-handed murdering an apparently innocent woman in a foreign country. Unfortunately for them, Helm didn't fall for it.
Played with in Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. In this case, it actually was the driver; he had simply been brainwashed, and Artemis saw through the whole trick right away. To no avail.
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of Meng Huo's captures is a result of one of these, with a boat captain instead of a driver.
In The Pendragon Adventure, this happens so many times to the protagonists (in various forms), that at one point a character hails a cab, opens the driver door, grabs the cabbie, and says "Does this guy look familiar to anyone?"
In Book 2 of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, the chauffeur Bartimaeus had spent several pages mentioning as particularly stolid and a pillar of the British work ethic turns out to be covering the presence of a homicidal possessed skeleton, who promptly resumes wreaking havoc.
Invoked in Clive Cussler's Vixen 03- an intelligence agent is told to catch a taxi to meet his contact, so he goes to hail the first one he sees when another taxi cuts in. He climbs in anyway, where it is revealed his contact is driving. The agent is then chewed out for bad fieldcraft (by trying to catch the first taxi he saw, which could have been a trap).
In Quiller's Run by Adam Hall, Quiller gets picked up by a limo outside the embassy where he's just been briefed on his target (who has already disposed of two other agents sent to kill her) and barely escapes the subsequent ambush. He later lambasts himself for being so incredibly stupid as to fall for that trick.
A nasty example in Neil Gaiman's short story collection Fragile Things, featuring Smith and Mr Alice, to dispose of an academic who knows too much. A black cab came around the corner, its light on this time. I waved it down, and helped Professor Macleod into the back. It was one of our Particular Cabs. The kind you get into and you don’t get out of.
The Rebus novel Hyde and Seek, by Ian Rankin has a witness kidnapped by a fake ambulance.
Simon Darcourt was not the driver of a number of people throughout A Snowball In Hell
This happens at the end of the first Alex Rider book. Having stopped Herod Sayle and recieved exactly no reward from the people who blackmailed him into doing it, Alex walks out of MI 6's secret HQ and into the first cab he sees. The driver? Herod Sayle. Alex only survives thanks to the guy's chief assassin turning on him.
In Tiassa by Steven Brust, Cawti and Norathar take elaborate precautions to avoid having this happen, randomly choosing to get in the seventh coach in line based on the exact time.
This is the entire plan of the Sympathetic Murderer in the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study In Scarlet". He became a cabby so he could subtly follow his Asshole Victims around London in hopes of getting one of them alone. It ultimately works, though it seems rather far-fetched for all the reasons listed above; the one time his targets split up, one of them gets drunk and manages to take the murderer's cab.
- A Genre Savvy Holmes ensures Watson does not fall victim to this trope in "The Final Problem". He even ensures that a driver (this one he arranged for) that Watson ultimately ended up with was Holmes's brother Mycroft.
In the morning you will send for a hansom, desiring your man to take neither the first nor the second which may present itself.
In one of The Saint short stories, two robbers run out of the jewellery store they have just robbed and jump into the back seat of the waiting getaway car. Only after the car pulls away do they notice that the driver if not the man they had left in the car but actually Simon Templar. He sprays them in the face with an ammonia filled water pistol and steals their loot.
In the Agatha Christie novel Cat Among the Pigeons, Princess Shaista, a student at Meadowbrook School, gets into a car to meet her uncle in London and never arrives. This is a subversion, though, because it actually was her driver. "Shaista" was an impostor, and the car had come to help her disappear before she met anyone who knew the real Princess, making it look like a kidnapping.
In Little Green Men, John O. Banion is in Palm Springs to make a speech, and is on the way to his hotel when he suffers Alien Abduction for the second time. He doesn't suspect that the driver (whom he saw on the operating table beside him) was part of the conspiracy that stages the abductions, though he does get annoyed that the car was a luxury sedan rather than the stretch limo clearly specified in his contract. The reason for this is that a helicopter couldn't lift a stretch limo into the air.

Live Action TV

Doctor Who did this in the episode "The Runaway Bride" (the second Christmas Special of the new series). The Bride of the title gets kidnapped in this way by one of the killer Santa Clauses, who is driving a taxi.
- Before in Terror of the Autons the Doctor and Jo are about to be lynched by carnies then the police turn up. As there are only two constables to contend with the crowd of carnies, the sensible course was to rescue the Doctor and Jo by taking the pair into protective custody. The Doctor notes it is unusual that the Brigadier has used his head for once and the constables aren't very talkative, the pair turn out to be the killer shop window dummies of the title. Another old school case is the killer limousine driver who picks the Doctor up in The Seeds of Doom.
In Torchwood: Children of Earth Gwen gets picked up after the Hub bombing by ambulance paramedics who turn out to be MI5 assassins out to finish her off.
In 24 season one, Jack kidnaps Ted Cofell, by taking the place of his personal driver. He then does it again to "Alan York" (really Kevin Caroll), who gets in the car with Ted Cofell (who Jack had killed).
Inverted on Heroes. Mohinder Suresh, one of the protagonists, funds his research into finding super powered people by driving a cab. Bennet, The Dragon and the series' Magnificent Bastard, attempts to ambush Suresh by posing as a fare. Ironically, Suresh also taxis Peter without ever knowing he's one of the people he's looking for.
- Additionally, Sylar kills Mohinder's father, Chandra, in his own taxi.
  - In the Season 3 Finale, neither the driver nor the car's owner were actually who they were supposed to be.
- The Suresh taxi seemed to have some sort of magical gravity: any time any main character ever needed to go anywhere in New York, they'd end up in Suresh's taxi.
At the end of the audition tape that concluded Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents Association speech, Colbert has successfully outrun Helen Thomas and fled Washington for New York. He steps off the plane, breathes a sigh of relief and gets into his car - to find Thomas in the driver's seat. His reaction is predictable.
Somewhat subverted in the House episode "Living the Dream", when House kidnaps his favorite soap star because he believes that he has a life-threatening illness (or is just bored, we're never 100% sure).
Beautifully subverted in series 2 episode 9 of Life, where Charlie tries to kidnap one of the people involved in his imprisonment. "You misunderstand me, this isn't a kidnapping. This, detective, is a kidnapping".
In one episode of Forever Knight, a man kidnaps a rich society lady and her daughter by killing their chauffeur and taking the driver's seat while the two women are out shopping.
NCIS. In "Reveille" Ari pulls up alongside Kate on the street, knowing she'll commandeer the first car she sees to chase him. Unfortunately it's full of Ari's mooks.
This trope pops up occasionally on Smallville.
The episode of Mission: Impossible "The Killer" (or at least, its remake) involved taking the villain to a bugged hotel. However, they didn't know in advance which hotel he would want to go to, so the first two cabs of the airport were crewed by IMF agents. The second cab slowly*
They purposely put obstacles on the road to buy time
takes him to the the hotel that wasn't there yesterday while said hotel gets puts the name the baddie chose ("The Raeburn Hotel") on its front porch (and everything else).
Done in the original Battlestar Galactica to trick Baltar into releasing the hostages. Though, to be fair, they had to do this, as Baltar demanded his centurions, who were already disassembled. They manage to rebuild them, but they can't do anything well. As soon as he releases the hostages, he orders the centurions to launch. Thr pilot says "By your command" and punches through the controls. The colonials then surround Baltar and take him prisoner again.
In The Sandbaggers, this happens to Wellingham on a routine visit to Brussels; he's suspicious when his regular driver doesn't show, but gets in his limo when the new driver shows him a set of proper NATO-issued credentials. Since the kidnapping turns out to have been masterminded by the West German government as part of a Batman Gambit to arrest a terrorist cell outside their proper jurisdiction, the credentials are probably even real...
Attempted in True Blood, where the imposter soon discovers why it's a dumb idea to try to deceive a telepath.
For an episode of Derren Brown's Trick or Treat series, he began by having an eerily silent taxi driver take his victim past his destination to a dark alleyway where a bunch of actors in hoodies surrounded the cab. Of course, by this point the guy was on the phone to the police.
The MO of the "Cabbie Killer" in CSI: New York.
This happens to the title character in the series two finale of Sherlock. After getting in the first cab he sees, he's treated to a video of Moriarty explaining his plan like something out of a kid's fairy-tale. He gets out of the cab, runs to the driver's window - and sees Moriarty, who quips "No charge" and drives off.

Professional Wrestling

The Undertaker, in full satanic cult leader mode pulled this one on (then) Purity Sue Stephanie McMahon as part of his nefarious "marry the owner's daughter in a dark wedding so I can take over the company" scheme.
- Minor meme that simply must be invoked: "WHERE TO, STEPHANIE?"
  - It was recently redone, except the target was Theodore Long, who had been involved in a reenactment of the Montreal Screwjob (with the Undertaker being the one who got screwed over). "Buckle up, Teddy..."
- It was also done in 2001 to Triple H and Stone Cold Steve Austin when he hijacked an ambulance taking Austin to the hospital ("HELLO, BOYS!!!"). What is it with The Undertaker and this trope, anyway?
Eddie Guerrero once pulled this on JBL during his Bugs Bunny phase.
JBL: Driver, take me back to New York City!
Eddie: (a la the Pace Chunky Salsa ads) New York City?!? (turns around for The Reveal) We aren't going to New York City... but we are going for a ride! And I promise you it'll be better than Disneyland!

Video Games

The original Grand Theft Auto did this at least once. In one of the missions, you use a stolen ambulance to kidnap the District Attorney from the hospital.
- In Grand Theft Auto III, you are tasked with following a taxi cab that your mark gets into. You can't get too close, or he freaks out. You can avoid this by stealing your own cab and pulling next to the mark ahead of time.
- It is used again in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where the main character has to imitate the chauffeur of a recording artist's manager, in order to kill him by driving into the sea.
- And twice more in Liberty City Stories: once with you pretending to be a union boss's chauffeur, and then an inversion of the series' norm when the Sindaccos kidnap Maria this way.
One of the missions against the Vice Kings in Saints Row involves the player taking the place of their brothel mistress's limousine driver, and then driving her around town (and away from a Saints ambush) before she'll lead you to her home, where one of your friends is being held hostage.
- Done three times in the optional assassination missions in Saints Row: The Third. One of the targets is a Morningstar lieutenant who will only come out if you pull up in a limo and pretend to be his chauffeur. Then, after the contact who gave you that target betrays you, you get revenge through another anonymous contact putting a hit out on him, telling you to lure him out by landing on his roof with a helicopter to pick him up. Much later, you get a target who must be killed in a way that doesn't draw attention to the Saints, so you have to pick her up in a jet which apparently has explosives planted in it, fly it high enough above the city, and then jump out so it can explode and kill her.
A trailer for Hitman: Contracts featured this. A rich businessman has discovered that he is about to be assassinated by 47 and promptly escapes the apartment building he's in, taking flight in a limo that's waiting outside. When the driver is told to start driving, he lowers the divider window to reveal the barcode tattoo.
Businessman: Oh, sh-*silenced gunshot*

Web Comics

In Kevin & Kell, after some time in which Kell comes home too late to spend any time with Kevin, she gets in her car to be driven to work, but finds that Kevin has given her driver Wally the day off, enabling him to be with her.
Girl Genius' Gil Wulfenbach, at one point, manages to fend off an army of deadly clanks, on his own, with the help of a weapon that may or may not have been useless junk and a very, very good poker face. Afterwards, he nearly collapses, mostly from relief, (and from multiple bullet wounds) and a few Jagermonsters arrive just in time to prop him up and steer him off the battlefield. They have a conversation that goes on for a good five minutes before Gil's powers of observation kick in.
Gil: Wait, you're... not Wulfenbach Jagers.
Jager: Nope.
Gil: Ah. Are you kidnapping me?
- Turns out that the answer is, "kind of."

Web Original

Associated Space has Fatebane and David trying to escape a planet by hiring a space freighter captain to pick them up in mid-flight from a suborbital shuttle. They shouldn't have put the job of rescuing them out to bid online, since the guy who accepted their offer turned out to be the detective chasing them.
"Ecce Perago", a story in the SCP Foundation universe, has a high-ranking Foundation official enter her car only to find out that her driver has been sneakily replaced by Dr. Gerald. Who is a generally nice person... but every time he sits behind a wheel, he inevitably somehow causes a horrible accident and kills all passengers.

Western Animation

An episode of Batman: The Animated Series has this, where the Joker impersonates the helicopter pilot of Cameron Kaiser, a one-shot character, to try and kill him.
- Also, in the animated Batman/Superman crossover movie, Lex Luthor's usual driver (Mercy Graves) is waylaid and impersonated by Harley Quinn, so the Joker can meet with him.
  - The comic adaptation adds in a bit of dialogue humorously implying that the real Mercy was taped up in the trunk the entire time.
Also showed up in Superman: The Animated Series, with Lana getting into a car she thinks is being driven by Luthor's usual assistant... "Sorry. No Mercy tonight."
This also happens in Justice League Unlimited, with the hero of the episode, The Question, posing as a cabbie in order to interrogate a mid-level mook. In a nice touch, a shot from the back seat includes a small photo of the driver, so that eagle-eyed viewers can see that the guy up front really is not his driver.
In the cartoon Baseball Bugs, the dirty Gas House Gorillas need a home run to win the game. The batter knocks Bugs' first pitch clear out of the park. Bugs flags down a cab, telling the driver to "follow that ball!", but the cab screams off in the wrong direction. It's being driven by one of the Gorilla's players, and according to the posted driver credentials, it really IS his cab. In The Unmentionables, special-agent Bugs is taxi-napped by Rocky's gang in this way as he leaves FBI headquarters.
Used a good number of times by Nick Fury in Spider-Man: The Animated Series. The cab would then turn into a hovercraft and fly back to base.
Dimitri abducts the dowager empress this way in Anastasia and actually points out to her that he's done so.
[Dmitri Drives Like Crazy]
Dowager: Ilya! Slow down!
Dmitri: I'm not Ilya. And I won't slow down, not until you listen. [He's looking over his shoulderas he says this, too.]
In Swat Kats, Mac Mange does this to kidnap Mayor Manx and Ms. Briggs. He gives himself away instantly due to his crummy driving.
A comedic variant was used in X-Men: Evolution: Kitty has just gotten her learner's permit and is eager to drive. Throughout the episode, Professor X obliges several different X-Men (Jean, Scott, Storm, and Wolverine) to take her driving—with near disastrous results. At the end of the episode, Professor X asks "Logan" to drive back to the mansion, only to discover Kitty in the driver's seat.
Parodied in The Venture Bros.. Not only does Dr. Venture not notice his driver is the 8-foot gray-skinned guy with a metal jaw we went to college with, but he doesn't even notice when Phantom Limb begins gloating about the kidnapping over television screen (he's too busy listening to his Walkman). Fortunately for Dr. Venture, they put the knockout gas in the front seat.
- Later in the same episode, Dr. Venture gets into the same cab with the same poorly disguised driver - and no, he still doesn't notice.
The Simpsons: Homer and Bart are specifically told not to go into unlicensed cabs in Brazil, advice which they of course ignore. They end up with not a normal cab driver, but a kidnapper.
Driver: My American friend, I'm afraid this is a kidnapping.
Homer: So that means I don't have to pay the fare?
Driver: Well, I suppose -
Homer: Woo-hoo!
Driver: I'm afraid you don't appreciate the seriousness of the situation.
Homer: Fine, take me, but please let the boy go.
Driver: I'm afraid he's already gone.
Homer: (turns to see Bart walking off) D'oh!
Parodied in Family Guy, and lampshaded by a speech in which the real driver demonstrates how easily he gets knocked out.
Filmation The New Adventures of Superman episode "Luthor Strikes Again". After Jimmy Olsen gets into a cab, steel plates slide up covering the windows, trapping him inside. It turns out to be a trap set by Lex Luthor.

Real Life

This tactic was used, unsuccessfully, by the Gotti crime family to do away with radio host, founder of the Guardian Angels and witness in a then-upcoming murder trial Curtis Sliwa. He was badly wounded, but managed to escape the specially-rigged taxi cab.

Old Fashioned Rowboat Date

Missing Mission Control

I Have Your Index

Over-the-Shoulder Carry