Geely revived Volvo and is breathing life into Lotus and Smart. Steering London Electric Vehicle Company has been more of a handful.
(Bloomberg) — China’s Geely has built quite the track record of buffing up European auto assets in need of repair.
It bought Volvo Car on the cheap from Ford in 2010 and had it running better than ever within a few years. It took control of Lotus in 2017 and is merging the manufacturer’s electric-vehicle subsidiary with a blank-check company. It acquired 50% of Smart from Daimler in 2020 and is now completely reengineering the small-car brand’s lineup.
Before all that, in 2013, Geely rescued the maker of London’s black cabs after its parent entered administration. This fixer-upper hasn’t turned around quite like the others.
The business was reborn as London Electric Vehicle Company in 2017, with Geely investing more than £500 million ($629 million) in a new global headquarters and the UK’s first dedicated EV manufacturing plant. The facility in Coventry has the ability to produce as many as 20,000 vehicles a year, and the potential to boost that output another 80% with minor adjustments.
But LEVC hasn’t come anywhere close to utilizing all this capacity. The Coventry factory only produced its 10,000th car in March, more than five years after shipping its first electric taxi with a range-extending small engine. It’s running on just one shift, four days a week.
The decade Geely has spent steering LEVC has been bleak for its customer base. The emergence of Uber and other ride-hailing and sharing companies was highly disruptive to the taxi trade. Then came the pandemic and the years-long supply-chain disruptions that drove up battery prices and made semiconductors scarce.
As a low-volume manufacturer, LEVC doesn’t have a lot of pull with the 220-plus suppliers feeding it more than 2,500 parts. “We are very much on the knife edge of all of these things,” Managing Director Chris Allen told reporters Thursday.
Allen and Alex Nan, LEVC’s chief executive officer, gave a first glimpse of what could catapult the company out of its position of scraping by: an all-electric platform that will extend its product range beyond high-ceiling hackney carriages.
LEVC’s Space Oriented Architecture has been in development for 2 ½ years across R&D centers in China, Sweden, the UK and Germany. The company will utilize it for both people-movers and delivery vehicles. And LEVC is no longer content largely sticking just to commercial customers, seeing potential to make luxury vans or even mobile homes.
When exactly these ideas will go from the drawing board to dealerships is unclear. The UK’s charging infrastructure will need to move further along for LEVC to move to fully electric taxis. “Our drivers can’t afford downtime within that product,” Allen said.
For all the upbeat talk about the architecture, LEVC is still a ways away from joining the pantheon of Geely success stories. Whereas Volvo Car listed in 2021, spinoff company Polestar went public in June of last year, and Lotus Technology is up next, LEVC is keeping its head down. The focus for the time being, Nan said, is to get the business in better shape.
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