Carbodies

Carbodies was a coachbuilding and vehicle manufacturing company based on Holyhead Road in Coventry, England, founded in 1919 by Robert Jones, a former general manager at the coachbuilder Hollick and Pratt. For its first half century it built standardised bodies for car makers that had no body shops of their own, among them MG, Alvis, Rover, Invicta, Railton and above all the Rootes Group, and it developed a method of converting steel saloons into convertibles and estate cars. From 1948 it made the bodies of the Austin FX3 London taxi and from 1958 those of the Austin FX4, took over complete taxicab manufacture from Austin in 1971 and became the sole maker of the FX4 in 1982. It was owned by the BSA Group from 1954 and by Manganese Bronze Holdings from 1973, traded as London Taxis International from 1992 and as The London Taxi Company from 2010, and entered administration in 2012, after which Geely bought its taxi assets.