so when Continental raised the price of the engine, Teledyne Continental vice president Bill Rutherford recalled the company lost the Checker account and that "everybody was mad at us. But we stopped the losses, or 'advertising' expense" of overbuilt engines. It was the last automotive application for the venerable Continental design, as the company had moved on to specialize in aviation engines after the war. Checker went on to incorporate an ever higher percentage of GM parts. By the 1970s the Checker cab design was several automotive generations old. As the decade started, the Checker A11 design had been in production for close to twenty years. A11 design elements could be attributed to a 1950 clay design. Some chassis components retained ancestral linkage to the 1939 Model A design. The A11 and A12 were still produced throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, albeit in ever-smaller numbers and updated for Federal safety and emissions requirements. In July 1982, the last Checker automobile left the Kalamazoo assembly plant. It was an A11 Taxi, painted in Chicago green and ivory livery. Checker was now out of the automobile manufacturing business. Epilogue The last operating Checker Cab in New York City, an A11 built in 1978 with plate #1N11 and nicknamed "Janie", was retired in on July 26, 1999, as a New York City taxicab ordinance passed in 1996 requires that livery vehicles be replaced after six years of service. Janie, which racked up during her service, has since been sold at auction in 1999 (US$134,500), 2006 ($9,400), and 2015 ($7,700). Today, the vast majority of Checker automobiles are gone, having spent hard lives as taxicabs over rough city streets. Most survivors are from the later A11 and A12 models, and occasionally come up for sale at collector car shows and Internet sites. Virtually all of the pre-1960 models are gone with the exception of a handful of cars in museums, since they were never prized as collector cars. Pre-war survivors include two Model H (one owned by the Gilmore Car Museum and the other in Hollywood), one Model G pickup, one Model T, two Model Ms (a taxi and a farm truck), and two Model Ys (one sedan and one two truck conversion). Only one 1939 Model A is known to exist. It has been restored and resides in a private collection. A few post-war Checkers are in the hands of