Geely’s LEVC London cab unit is pinning its hopes on a new groupwide platform for larger passenger vehicles to deliver the scale effects it has so far lacked for its flagship TX plug-in hybrid.
LEVC, short for London Electric Vehicle Company, started production of the TX cab in 2017 at a new facility near Coventry, central England, after Geely bought the struggling taxi maker in 2013.
The development team leveraged Geely’s ownership of Volvo Cars to create an all-new taxi loosely based on Volvo's scalable product architecture (SPA) but with its own bespoke bonded aluminium unibody. That created an efficient, lightweight and roomy cab that has been a hit with London’s tightly controlled taxi community.
However, it was also expensive to build, and LEVC has struggled with higher costs after falling short in its original plan to both spin off a successful van version and create a market for the vehicles outside of the U.K.
The company has also been hit hard by rising parts costs, soaring interest rates and a depressed market for its cabs amid a pandemic slump in taxi demand.
"We have a hard task fighting that as a small OEM," said Chris Allen, LEVC’s U.K. managing director, told Automotive News Europe at a recent event to unveil the new architecture.
LEVC lost 118 million pounds ($135 million) in the year ended December 2021, according to the most recent company filings available. The company increased prices of its TX taxi by 2.5 percent in January to about 65,000 pounds ($82,000) to compensate for some but not all of the increased cost to build the model.
"We have had to absorb a lot of the cost increases ourselves," Allen said.
The company last year cut 140 employees to save money. It now operates a single shift running four days a week, building 3,000 vehicles a year in a factory with the capacity for 24,000. That figure is less than the 3,500 average produced at the outdated plant nearby that Geely replaced.