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 That figure is less than the 3,500 average produced at the outdated plant nearby that Geely replaced.
A reprieve from rising costs may come from the new full-electric platform, called space oriented architecture, or SOA. (Geely’s main full-electric passenger car platform is called sustainable experience architecture, or SEA.)
Rather than building the TX on a bespoke platform using Volvo parts, LEVC can take advantage of this new architecture, which can be used for a wide range of large vehicles from SUVs to minivans, commercial vans and taxis.
“Currently, we draw on Volvo’s SPA architecture, but there is a still a huge amount of unique content,” Allen said. “SOA will allow us to start leveraging that wider supply chain security.”
No time frame was given for LEVC to start using SOA, and initial models are expected to be built in China, where minivans are popular. The company also builds the TX in China using more locally sourced content.
There is also currently no time frame for London’s black cabs to go all-electric, and Allen is pressing local authorities in the U.K. to expand the overall charging infrastructure before committing to an all-electric model.
It is also possible that SOA could be industrialized elsewhere in Europe before it makes sense for the Coventry plant, which will continue to make the cabs. However, Volvo has moved to a more premium SPA2 electric platform for its larger models, ruling it out as a partner.
But the flexibility of the platform would enable LEVC to build other models with a wider use case than the very specific requirements of the London taxis, which still have a minimum headroom height left over from the days when male passengers used to wear top hats.
Models that could use the platform include pickups and even camper vans, which command a purchase price high enough to absorb the extra costs of building in the U.K.