“Incredibly sad” day for Coventry as electric taxi manufacturer closes 140 jobs

The London Electric Vehicle Company (LEVC) has announced that they plan on cutting 140 jobs from their current Coventry factory in Antsy Park. This comes after changes in demand for electric taxis in the aftermath of the Coronavirus, as well as supply chain disruptions.

LEVC’s parent company, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group (CZGH) – which also owns the likes of Volvo, Lotus and others – stated that the voluntary redundancy program seeks to return the factory to “sustainable profitability and growth”, according to Business Live.

The £300m Antsy Hall factory was only opened in 2017, and in 2020 the company said that it expected the Coventry base to be profitable by 2021.

Due to a variety of factors, most explicitly being changes in demand after the coronavirus pandemic and supply chain disruptions, the company lost £118m in the year ended December 2021, according to company filings.

Filings in the same year reported that LEVC were employing about 550 staff at the end of 2021. This cut will represent a shrinking of LEVC’s staff size by 26.5%.

Company spokespersons, however, have declined to publicly reveal the number of staff at the Coventry base.

This cut comes only a few years after the a previous rounds of cuts in 2019 when LEVC Antsy Hall spokespeople announced that the year was supposed to be a “challenging” one.

LEVC was the first manufacturer to develop electric versions of the iconic London black cab, and the Antsy Hall plant was visited by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2021, where he called it a “state of the art world-class facility”.

The vehicles produced in the Antsy Park factory were called “the world’s most advanced electric taxi” by Chief Executive Alex Nan, who added that they had sold 7,600 vehicles since launch and “saved 127,000 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.”

West Midlands Mayor Andy Street called the current decision an “incredibly sad” one. Andy Street also stated “If it [job cuts] is part of the way [the company] can become more successful for the long term, sometimes it has to be done.”