The London Taxi Company was a taxi design and manufacturing company based in Coventry, England. It formerly traded as London Taxis International and Carbodies. It operated a coachbuilding business on Holyhead Road, Coventry. After half a century making short runs of limited demand bodies for major manufacturers it was obliged to replace these now moribund activities and in 1971 took from its former customer and supplier of taxi chassis, Austin, the manufacture of complete London taxicabs. Two years later was bought by Manganese Bronze Holdings. Rebranded as The London Taxi Company in October 2010, it was placed in administration in October 2012, with certain assets purchased by Geely to form what is now the London EV Company. History The origins of The London Taxi Company can be traced to 1919, when Robert 'Bobby' Jones, a former general manager at coachbuilder Hollick & Pratt took over the coachbuilding operations of his then employer, timber merchants Gooderhams and set up in business in premises acquired from Thomas Pass in West Orchard, Coventry. 1919-1954 Standardised Coachwork Rather than make bespoke bodies to individual designs, Carbodies set out to produce coachwork to a number of standardised designs for car companies that did not have their own coachbuilding facilities. Their first major customers during the 1920s were MG and Alvis Cars. The scale of a new contract to build bodies for the MG M-Type Midget meant that they needed larger premises and in 1928, they moved to a larger site on Holyhead Road, where they remain to this day. In the 1930s, they supplied bodies for Rover, Invicta and Railton, but by far their biggest and most important customer in that decade was the Rootes Group. During World War II the company made bodies for military vehicles. They also acquired press tools through the Lend-Lease scheme, which enabled them to make aircraft components. In 1943, Carbodies also became a limited company at this time, with Bobby Jones as governing director and his son, Ernest Jones managing director. Taxicabs, Convertibles, Daimlers and other Postwar Vehicles After the war, Carbodies negotiated with London taxi dealer Mann & Overton and Austin to make bodies for the Austin FX3 taxi, introduced in 1948, as well as finishing and delivering the complete vehicles. More than 7,000 FX3s, mainly destined for London, were produced over 10 years. They also developed a system for turning modern all-steel saloon cars into convertibles. This