Here’s a Geely Englon TX4. I met it at a car market in south Beijing in 2016. The TX4 looked like a charm, painted in blue with a shiny grille and the taxi sign above the windshield.
The Englon TX4 harks back to the early 2000s, a confusing time when Geely launched a confusing number of brands and series. Geely launched the Englong brand in 2010. The Chinese name was 英伦, Yīnglún, which means “British”.
The main asset of the Englon brand was the London Taxi Company, aka London Taxis International (LTI). This company created the original black London cab. Geely acquired LTI in 2013. The Englon TX4 was the China-made variant of the LTI TX4 taxi.
Production in China started in 2008 in Geely’s Shanghai Maple factory. The first batches went straight to Beijing for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Today, the Geely Group fully owns the company, which now operates under the name London Electric Vehicle Company (LEVC).
Interior
This is an early China-made car, with an LTI badge on the steering wheel, a very British interior, apart from the steering wheel, which is on the right side. It has all the well-known faux-wood trim, luggage nets, and hard-core black plastic trim.
In 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, organizers mainly used the Geely Englon TX4 to ferry disabled folks around. At the time, Chinese taxi makers didn’t produce any disabled-abled vehicles. Note the ramp in front of the side door of the vehicle, meant to roll in and out wheelchairs.
Specs
Geely offered the Englon TX4 with two engines:
- a 2.4-liter gasoline with 152 hp and 212 Nm.
- a 2.5-liter turbo diesel with 102 hp and 240 Nm.
The only transmission was a five-speed manual. In China, authorities classified the Englon TX4 as a seven-seat MPV. The Chinese classification system is complicated, even today, without much distinction between SUVs and MPVs.
A lot is going on here. This is: 上海英伦, Shànghǎi Yīnglún, Shanghai for Geely’s Shanghai Maple factory’s city, and Yinglun for the brand’s name.
I lived in Beijing during the Olympics, and I did see the TX4 at expensive hotels and Olympic venues. However, after 2008, the TX4 completely disappeared from the streets of Beijing. However, elsewhere it did quite well. I remember seeing them in Shanghai until the late 2000s, and production finally ended in 2012.
The license plate is from Inner Mongolia, approximately 500 kilometers away. That must have been an expensive ride!