Ineos Automotive, founded by British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe to create an “uncompromising 4x4” in the mould of the original Land Rover Defender, has confirmed that its new vehicle family will carry the name Grenadier and be built in an all-new plant in Bridgend, South Wales.
The £600 million project will utilise body and chassis parts sourced from – and painted in – a second new Ineos car plant currently being commissioned in Estarreja, Portugal, close to many established automotive suppliers.
The Grenadier name, which was chosen from an online poll of 6000 fans and followers, invokes the Knightsbridge pub where Ratcliffe, a lifelong Land Rover fan, first hatched his plan to build his own no-frills 4x4. The project has been live since early 2017. The company will unveil the completed vehicle next year, although it won’t detail the launch plans yet.
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Ineos expects its two new plants to each create around 500 new jobs once production hits full speed. Ratcliffe says the company had “lots of good options across the world” for locating the plants but chose Wales for the final assembly “as a significant expression of confidence in British manufacturing”. Ineos will eventually build 25,000 cars per year once it completes a production ramp-up from the beginning of production in 2021 and says it could do even more than that if business exceeds expectations.
Ineos says it can’t yet specify an entry price for the Grenadier, but commercial director Mark Tennant confided that the costs of current safety equipment and compliance testing are unlikely to allow Ineos to match outgoing Defender prices that started in the low-£20,000s bracket. However, he admitted to keeping a close eye on the four-seat pick-up truck market (Ineos will launch such a model), where prices for well-equipped versions currently start below £30,000. Four-seat pick-ups currently account for 60,000 sales in the UK and 200,000 across Europe.
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Wishing success
I wish success for courageous Mr. Ratcliffe and hope he plans much deeper than what seems doubtful to me.
The man who can sell snow to the Inuit.
Just when major car companies are starting to "seriously" look at manufacturing EV's we have one of the men who sold us Brexit, by trying to sell us ideas of our past empire days, now trying to make us go back to buying antique designs of car based on a design from the end of our empire days.
Nominally British
EdwardElgar wrote:
Or perhaps even Rolls Royce with German made painted bosies meeting German built engines and transmissions before being finished in the Goodwood factory?