Jewels in the Crown E-Book

Ray Hutton

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 272

Beschreibung

Jewels in the Crown provides an analysis of Tata's acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008, and subsequent transformation of their fortunes, written by an award-winning motoring writer. Ray Hutton goes behind the scenes to examine how Tata have not only returned the business to profit, but also transformed the public image of these long-established British brands.

Leseprobe

Jewels in the Crown

RAY HUTTQN

Jewels in the Crown

How Tata of India transformed Britain’s Jaguar and Land Rover

First published 2013 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 27 John Street, London WC1N 2BXwww.eandtbooks.com

epub ISBN: 978-1-908739-83-4 MOBI ISBN: 978-1-909653-06-1

Text © Ray Hutton 2013

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in Baskerville by MacGuru Ltd

Contents

Introduction

Author’s note

1 ‘A car company of consequence’

2 Jaguar’s faded glory

3 Land Rover – cars for all reasons

4 India’s powerhouse

5 Ambitions unfulfilled

6 Premium brands for sale

7 Tata’s inheritance

8 Business as usual

9 Downturn

10 The boys from BMW

11 Reorganisation, new spirit

12 One company, two brands

13 Enter the Evoque

14 Range Rover lightens up

15 New ways for Jaguar

16 The F-Type saga

17 Record profits

18 JLR’s place in the world

19 Future unlimited

20 Why Tata succeeded

Appendix

Key players

Jaguar Land Rover financial performance

Jaguar Land Rover sales 2007–2012

Marque sales year-by-year

Premium brand league

Acknowledgements

Picture credits

About the author

Index

Introduction

WHEN TATA OF INDIA bought Jaguar and Land Rover from the Ford Motor Company in 2008, most people on the car side of the motor industry didn’t know much about Tata Motors. While other motor companies had taken advantage of India’s manufacturing base to supply low-cost small cars for world markets, Tata didn’t export many of its own cars. It was to make a much grander entrance to the world stage by acquiring two of the most famous names in motoring, the jewels in the crown of the British motor industry.

That crown was somewhat tarnished. There had been several decades of decline in car manufacturing in the UK. Jaguar, which had made the most sought-after sports cars in the world and proved their worth by winning the Le Mans 24 Hours race year after year, had fallen behind the times and wasn’t engaging with the new audience for premium cars. Land Rover was known for making the best four-wheel drive vehicles but was threatened by campaigns to make big, heavy sport utility vehicles (SUVs) socially unacceptable. And both Jaguar and Land Rover had patchy reputations for reliability.

Tata determined to build on the illustrious heritage and worldwide recognition of these brands. It faced plenty of scepticism but in less than five years Tata had silenced all the doubters: Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) moved from loss to substantial profit; it had become the world’s fastest-growing premium car company, and one of the most successful in terms of return on revenue. Jaguar Land Rover’s investment is the biggest in the UK motor industry in 50 years.

This book is an account of how this impressive business turnround was achieved. Jaguar Land Rover exists to make cars, so the story follows the concept, design and development of its products, the methods of production, and how they are promoted and sold across the world. To understand the heritage, it must also look back to the automotive icons that Tata inherited: the Jaguar E-Type and XJ6, the original Land Rover, and the Range Rover, king of the SUVs.

A motor manufacturer is a powerful mix of finance, engineering and marketing. The key to any industrial turnround is management, so this is also a story of people. Until recently, most of the world’s motor industry was run by a close-knit group of ‘car guys’ who didn’t welcome outsiders. Such are the convoluted histories of Jaguar and Land Rover that many senior managers have worked for one or both brands, separately or together, and, in some cases, several times.

In broad terms (as there have been any number of changes in company names and brand style), Jaguar has had four owners in the 68 years since it was formed from SS Cars and Land Rover has changed hands six times since its first vehicle appeared in 1948.

Each of the previous owners left some mark on the ways that Jaguar and Land Rover are regarded today. The early chapters are brief histories of the two marques and how they developed. In the 1960s they were brought together in what became British Leyland, then went their different ways, to be reunited as part of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group in 2000.

Ford’s changing circumstances, and personnel, are described in some detail to explain the lead-up to and conduct of the sale. And the background to Tata shows how it emerged from being an outsider in the bidding contest to drive a hard bargain and become the proud and ambitious owner of the two famous brands.

It also shows that one man was the driving force behind the deal and subsequent developments: Ratan Tata, chairman of the eponymous Group, who reached retirement age as the fifth anniversary of the takeover approached and this book was being written.

As well as being an industrial history, this is an allegory of the motor business over half a century: the decline of the British motor industry and the loss of the private companies operating within it; consolidation and foreign ownership; difficulties for mass-producers and the rise of premium brands; and the centre of gravity of sales shifting to Asia, predominately China.

As a long-serving writer and commentator on the car business, working for media in the UK, the US and India, I have been following the fortunes of Jaguar and Land Rover since the British Leyland era. My work has also taken me to the Indian car industry and Tata Motors, before, and since, the Jaguar Land Rover acquisition.

The Appendix includes a cast list of key figures in the evolution of Jaguar and Land Rover and the company’s current structure. I have met and talked with all but two of those listed and most of the other motor industry personalities included in this book. Where they are quoted directly, it is from interviews, on-the-record meetings which I attended, and previously published material.

There are still others, not mentioned by name, who were most helpful in guiding me through some of the more contentious aspects of Jaguar’s and Land Rover’s past and recent activities. I thank them for their forbearance and apologise to them and to you, the reader, for any errors or misinterpretations as, except where noted and quoted, the analysis and views expressed are my own.

Ray HuttonLondon, March 2013

Author’s Note

OF NECESSITY, there is some duplication of facts and happenings across chapters as the history is built up from three different directions and the recent development of each brand is treated separately. Although they are integrated as never before, Jaguar Land Rover strives to maintain a distinct individual character and voice for each brand.

The reader may also be confused by financial information being given variously in US dollars and pounds sterling. Essential figures are given only in the currency used at the time of the transaction or in published financial results. If these were quoted in the two currencies at any given time, the fluctuating £/$ exchange rate (ranging from 1:1 to 1:2 over 30 years) could make comparisons with earlier or later figures meaningless.

1

‘A car company of consequence’

RATAN TATA AND RAVI KANT sat at one end of a square of tables in a packed room at the Villa Sarasin, an elegant fin-de-siècle mansion once located in extensive grounds but now hidden by the concrete expanse of Palexpo, the Geneva exhibition centre.

The chairman and managing director of Tata Motors were no strangers to the Geneva Motor Show and its attendant press corps. The Indian company had exhibited the Indica, its first family car, in 1998, when it generated only mild interest from financial journalists and the other motor manufacturers who use the show preview days as an annual business convention.

Earlier that day, 4 March 2008, Tata had held its normal press conference on the motor show stand – a brief speech introducing its latest models, which included the Nano, the back-to-basics 1-lakh (100,000 rupees, £1,250) car that was expected to revolutionise the still-evolving Indian car market. But the untypically large crowd of journalists and photographers was there for another reason. They wanted, needed, to get a glimpse of and a comment from the bosses of the Indian company that was about to become the owner of two of Britain’s most revered car marques – Jaguar and Land Rover.

The Ford Motor Company had declared Tata the preferred bidder for its crown jewels just two months earlier. Newspapers and radio and TV stations swamped the company with applications for interviews with the chairman, Ratan Tata. To meet all those requests was impossible, so Tata Motors communications chief, Debasis Ray, arranged a round-table conference for a selected few, off-site at the Villa Sarasin.

Ratan Tata, courteous and softly spoken, explained that Tata was deep in due diligence at Jaguar and Land Rover and had yet to reach agreement with Ford – that would take another three weeks – so he could only talk of hopes and expectations, not solid plans. But he left no doubt about his company’s ambitions:

Ten years ago we came to the Geneva Motor Show as a new car company trying to find a place in the global motor industry. Tata is trying to become a car company of consequence.

Jaguar and Land Rover are iconic brands that we respect enormously. These companies were for sale. We were invited to bid and were pleased to be considered. We were not on the prowl to acquire another car company. This is a great opportunity; a few years ago one would not have thought these brands would be available.

Several of his inquisitors broached, directly or indirectly, the issues that were debated by car enthusiasts and motor industry pundits around the world: what does a company making cheap cars for India, with a poor record of quality and reliability, know about making high-technology and high-performance premium cars? Will Tata move production to India, with its lower cost base, and take Land Rover technology to improve its own more rudimentary four-wheel drive vehicles? And if Ford – one of the world’s biggest motor manufacturers – can’t make money from Jaguar and Land Rover, how will Tata succeed? Ratan Tata was reassuring:

We would retain the image, touch, and feel of Jaguar and Land Rover, not tinker with the brands in any way. Our philosophy for any companies we become involved with, is that we grow with them, take them forward. Our interest in Jaguar and Land Rover is not based on outsourcing, or taking their technology. Our challenge will be to nurture the brands and make them thrive.

In the UK, where curry is now regarded as a national dish, the press had been full of snappy headlines about the ‘Indian takeaway’ of Jaguar and Land Rover. Ratan Tata was asked if customers would accept traditional British cars from an Indian-owned company, and, by a representative of the more liberal-minded media, whether this was in some way a strike against the memory of British colonialism.

Tata already owned some 18 businesses in the UK, including Tetley Tea, a leading provider of the national beverage, and only a year before had paid £6.7 billion to take over Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steel firm. Ratan Tata, who has run the Tata Group according to British corporate principles, could see no problem in Indian ownership of Jaguar and Land Rover:

Many people, I imagine, did not know that Ford of America had owned Jaguar and Land Rover for many years. We are very conscious that the brands belong to Britain and they will continue to be British. Who owns them is not as material as the brands themselves, the enterprise and the people.

In all the companies we acquire, we have to be satisfied that they share the same value systems and ethical practices and that we gel on a human level.

So this is not a special moment for me in the sense of a developing country taking over in the old world. Anyway, I was well under-age when the Raj ended…

Journalists and commentators, invariably a cynical group, came away from this Geneva encounter feeling far more positive than most had expected. Elsewhere, financial and industry analysts pointed to the smooth transition at Corus and concluded that Tata would be a good custodian for these two famous but wearied British car brands.

Tata finalised the agreement with Ford to buy Jaguar and Land Rover on 27 March 2008. The price was $2.3 billion. The sale was completed on 2 June. Tata Motors, the fourth-biggest truck and bus manufacturer in the world and the first Indian engineering company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, was on its way to becoming ‘a car company of consequence’.

2

Jaguar’s faded glory

WILLIAM LYONS was the last of the patrician motor moguls. When he retired as chairman of Jaguar in 1972, he had run the company for nearly 50 years. It had grown out of the Swallow Sidecar Company, which he had established with a partner in Blackpool and progressed to coach-building stylish bodies for Austin Sevens, Standards and Wolseleys, and caddish, long-bonneted SS sports cars.

The business moved to Coventry in 1928, repaired aircraft and made components during the Second World War, and, fearful of SS being associated with defeated Nazi Germany, changed its name to Jaguar Cars as soon as the war was over, in 1945.

The new Jaguars became known for their sleek appearance, high performance and value for money. Lyons was the company’s driving force, involved with every aspect of the cars’ development and production, particularly their design, for which he had a sharp, discerning eye. His special talent was to create cars that were both pleasing aesthetically and aspirational: a sure-fire marketing proposition for a glossy, optimistic post-war world.

Success came with the XK120 sports car from 1949, a beauty that could do more than 120 mph when few production cars could reach 100, and led to a series of racing sports cars that were to win the Le Mans 24 Hour race five times in the 1950s and, in 1961, to the legendary E-Type, a 150 mph car sold for less than half the price of anything with the same performance.

The Jaguar saloon cars of the same period – the 2.4, 3.4 and 3.8 – are remembered now through films and TV as the cars of choice for both villains and the police flying squad but historically are more important for showing the way to the compact sports saloons that were to make BMW the supreme premium car maker in the twenty-first century.

Lyons, who was knighted in 1956, was an autocrat. Although Jaguar was a public company, he held a majority of the shares and made most of the decisions without reference to his fellow directors. According to one source,* there were no board meetings until the mid 1960s.

He had bought Daimler, the British car and bus manufacturer, in 1960, followed by Guy Motors, a commercial vehicle maker, and Coventry Climax, an engine specialist that was dominant in Formula 1 motor racing. But the 1960s were difficult times for the British motor industry, which was beset with labour problems, declining markets and increasing development costs. In 1965, the British Motor Corporation (BMC) – which included Austin, Morris, Riley and Wolseley cars – bought Pressed Steel, the company that made Jaguar car bodies.

In 1966, Lyons, approaching retirement age, began to be concerned about succession, for which he had made no provision, and Jaguar’s position in the changing industrial scene. With Pressed Steel, rival BMC controlled the supply of its cars’ most essential components. Lyons proposed a merger between BMC, Jaguar and Pressed Steel. It became British Motor Holdings (BMH). BMC chairman, Sir George Harriman, was the chairman of the new company but Lyons retained the title of chairman of Jaguar, and his business remained largely autonomous.

BMH didn’t last long. The Labour government, intent on improving the efficiency of British industry, encouraged cooperation with Leyland, a truck and bus maker that had recently acquired Standard-Triumph and Rover. That resulted in the formation, in 1968, of the British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC), which was the beginning of the end for Lyons as a motor magnate (in 1972, aged 70, he was given the honorary position of president of Jaguar) and, coincidentally, the first time that Jaguar and Land Rover came together in the same company.

The management of BLMC, which changed with monotonous regularity, struggled to handle Jaguar. There was no love lost between the engineers at Rover, Triumph and Jaguar and there was uproar when the factory in Browns Lane, Coventry, occupied by Jaguar since 1951, was renamed ‘Leyland Cars Large Car Assembly Plant’. Those who were put in charge of the Jaguar division – for that is what it had become – had limited freedom of action and lacked Lyons’ intuition for attractive, saleable cars.

This was a critical period for Jaguar, which reached a production peak of 31,549 cars in 1971 and continued to make an annual profit of around £5 million, although it was now part of a huge group that was losing money unsustainably. Classic car enthusiasts regard the E-Type as the icon but actually it was the 1968 XJ6 that defined Jaguar for the years to come. Sports and grand touring cars came and went but the core of the Jaguar range was the lithe, fast but comfortable XJ saloon.

By 1975, BLMC was broke and the British government, which saw it as ‘too big to fail’, reluctantly took it into public ownership. It was a time of industrial strife, from which British Leyland, Leyland Cars and BL, as it was progressively renamed, never really recovered.

Jaguar foundered as part of the JRT (Jaguar Rover Triumph) sub-division but Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which came to power in 1979, had begun moves to return BL to the private sector, starting with Land Rover and Jaguar. Land Rover was consistently profitable and easier to separate from the Leyland jungle because Jaguar was not self-contained – and had perpetual trouble with the quality of bodies and paintwork supplied by the former Pressed Steel plant at Castle Bromwich.

At the same time, it was recognised that, if it was to thrive – and eventually separate as a viable business – Jaguar needed more autonomy. As a first step, Castle Bromwich would be put under its control.

In 1980, John Egan, a forthright Lancastrian, was appointed chairman of Jaguar Cars Ltd and was promised a free hand to run the business. He inherited a company beset with industrial unrest and dire quality problems which had halved sales demand: 9,200 employees were making just 14,000 cars a year and the company losses amounted to nearly £50 million a year.

Egan’s first message to the employees was: ‘We have to turn this round, otherwise Jaguar will be closed.’ He has subsequently admitted that closure came ‘very close’ but step-by-step he addressed the problems – reducing the workforce, settling labour disputes, improving quality and productivity, getting tough with suppliers that produced second-rate components – and returned Jaguar to profitability.

Egan put his stamp on Jaguar, the first person to do so since Sir William Lyons, with whom he formed a cordial relationship. Lyons was proud to see the company he founded being taken back into private ownership in 1984, the year before he died at the age of 83.

There were flirtations with Ford, General Motors and BMW but the British government wanted a stock market flotation, rather than selling one of its prized assets to a foreign company. To guard against an unwelcome takeover bid, it would retain a ‘golden share’ to expire in 1990. The stock market offering was made in August 1984, with a price of 165p. It was eight times oversubscribed. Jaguar was once more in private hands.

Jaguar was to have less than six years as a stand-alone company. It was successful initially, launching the long-delayed (and government-funded) new XJ saloon, code-named XJ40, and new engines and open-topped versions to revive flagging sales of the XJ-S sports model. It increased brand awareness with an ambitious racing programme on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1986 it was geared up to produce 40,000 cars a year, and made a very respectable profit: £83.4 million from revenue of £830.4 million. Exports to the United States accounted for more than 40 per cent of sales.

In retrospect, it is clear that Jaguar became too dependent on transatlantic exports. Fluctuating exchange rates made selling in the US an uncertain business and were the main reason for Leyland pulling MG out of America. So while Jaguar reached record production of 49,500 in 1988, as the pound strengthened and the US dollar declined, its earnings started to deteriorate. The situation was made worse by the return of quality problems with the new version of the XJ6.

Egan realised that Jaguar was a minnow in the ocean of the world car industry and that, for a small manufacturer of premium cars, the cost of new model development was disproportionately high. Jaguar had increased its engineering headcount and paid £50 million for the former Chrysler UK technical centre at Whitley, near Coventry, but Egan feared that it might not have sufficient financial strength to meet future requirements.

He began to look around for partners, bigger companies that could reduce these ever-increasing costs, and favoured a proposition from General Motors whereby it would take 30 per cent of Jaguar and share components and technology with Opel and Vauxhall. But while that was being discussed, Ford came along with a killer bid to buy the whole company. It offered £8.50 a share, amounting to £1.6 billion.

That was in October 1989 and the British government’s ‘golden share’ was still valid. Jaguar’s directors had to recommend the Ford bid to the shareholders but it was far from certain that the government would allow it. But Ford knew that it was owed a favour. Four years before, Margaret Thatcher had approached Ford about buying Rover and Land Rover – and Bob Lutz, then chairman of Ford of Europe, was keen – but her invitation was withdrawn in the wake of the controversial ‘Westland Affair’, the furore surrounding the sale of Britain’s last helicopter company. She would not allow Ford to be rebuffed again.

Ford paid a high price, considering that Jaguar was losing money at that point and that Ford had not been able to carry out any due diligence. When it did get inside, it calculated that Jaguar’s tangible assets amounted to just £300 million. The story may be apocryphal, but when Ford’s dour chairman, Red Poling, challenged John Egan for selling him a £300 million company for £1.6 billion, the Jaguar chairman is said to have replied: ‘When you go to a fancy restaurant you go for the steak and the sizzle. You have paid £300 million for the steak and £1.3 billion for the sizzle.’ Nine years later, at the launch of the Jaguar S-Type, Poling’s successor, Alex Trotman (who had been one of the negotiators), remarked: ‘Everything I know about shareholder value I learned from John Egan.’

Ford, the original blue-collar motor manufacturer, wanted a fancy car company. It already had a share of Aston Martin, acquired on the whim of Henry Ford II, who was fond of the finer things in European life, but Aston was a boutique, making a few hundred cars a year. Ford management in Dearborn, Michigan, identified the need for a car that customers could move up to, beyond Lincoln, its US premium brand.

The premium car market was growing. Mercedes and BMW enjoyed the status of luxury goods in the United States and the Japanese car firms, at the height of their powers as mass-producers, had just launched their upmarket contenders – Acura (Honda), Infiniti (Nissan) and Lexus (Toyota).

Ford’s communications officers briefed journalists about the rationale of the Jaguar purchase and the aims and strategy for its development. Then, as now, BMW was its role model. Jaguar’s two-model range (XJ and XJ-S) would be expanded with new cars to compete against BMW’s best-selling 3 and 5 series. Ford confidently expected that, within a few years, Jaguar’s output would grow from 50,000 to 200,000 cars a year.

Meanwhile, Egan backed out, his task completed, and Ford sent in Bill Hayden, its British manufacturing chief, to be Jaguar chief executive. The blunt-speaking Hayden was horrified by what he found at Browns Lane and Castle Bromwich. He said that the worn-out facilities and working conditions and procedures were the worst he had seen in any plant ‘apart from Gorky’ (in Russia). At that later S-Type event, Alex Trotman quipped: ‘There was nothing wrong with Jaguar manufacturing that a bulldozer couldn’t fix.’

Hayden applied Ford manufacturing principles to Jaguar. He held back new products until he could see the results of modernising, setting higher quality standards, and cutting costs by improving efficiency. And he curtailed projects that seemed unlikely to produce a decent return – like XJ41, the long-awaited F-Type that was supposed to be the authentic successor to the E-Type.

Hayden retired after three years at Jaguar and was succeeded by Nick Scheele, a Briton who had run Ford in Mexico, and a more emollient character with a talent for motivating people. In America, Ford bosses seemed to have dialled back their ambitions for the company. At the chairman’s year-end press conference in December 1995, Trotman said: ‘Jaguar is doing well; it will make 40,000 cars this year.’

But in the background, the fast-moving Jacques (Jac) Nasser, head of Ford automotive operations and soon to follow Trotman as chief executive, was planning an altogether bigger future for Jaguar. There were to be two new models, both sharing their chassis platforms and mechanical parts with higher-volume Ford models.

The first of the new-deal Jaguars would be the S-Type, introduced in 1998, and built on the DEW98 rear-wheel drive platform designed in the US for a new small Lincoln, the LS. The second, which appeared three years later, was the X-Type, based on a European Ford Mondeo adapted with four-wheel drive.

This caused disquiet inside and outside the company. Could these cars maintain the character of a Jaguar? Wouldn’t the brand be diluted by using parts from cheaper, more commonplace cars?

Nasser, a Jaguar enthusiast, was adamant that it would lose nothing and had everything to gain. For the S-Type and Lincoln LS, which shared 60 per cent of components, engineers from Dearborn and Coventry worked side-by-side. A chassis engineer from Jaguar said: ‘Don’t think of a dumbed-down Jaguar, just a much better Lincoln.’ When it was launched as a smaller and less expensive companion to the XJ, the S-Type was generally well accepted, although the ‘neoclassic’ styling by Jaguar design chief, Geoff Lawson, received mixed reviews and there was criticism of some plastic interior fitments that were clearly more Ford than Jaguar.

But if Jaguar’s loyal customers gave the S-Type a cautious welcome, they were less generous to the X-Type, even though it resembled a shrunken XJ. Everyone knew that underneath the body was a Mondeo and in this case the Jaguar engineers had been able to do no more than tinker with an existing chassis. Jaguar learned some hard lessons here, which it must continue to heed.

Nasser and Scheele continually emphasised Jaguar’s Britishness while simultaneously using a veiled threat of making its new models somewhere else in the Ford empire to extract the maximum in UK government grants and assistance. It received £72 million to establish a new S-Type production line at the Castle Bromwich factory and £42 million to take the X-Type to the former Ford Escort plant at Halewood, near Liverpool and save it from closure.

With these new models, together with the XK8 coupe and convertible, which had been launched in 1996, the original long-term sales target looked possible. But, by then, Jaguar was once again incorporated within a bigger enterprise.

In March 2000, as BMW announced that it was giving up its six-year tenure of the Rover Group, Nasser swooped in on Land Rover with a £1.85 billion bid that was almost equivalent to the sum that BMW was having to write off to dispose of the business. The previous year he had recruited Wolfgang Reitzle, a former BMW high-flyer, and put him in charge of the newly created Premier Automotive Group (PAG), which encompassed all Ford’s high-end brands: then, Jaguar, Volvo, Lincoln and Aston Martin. Now Land Rover was added. It marked both a change of scale and attitude. Nasser’s target for PAG before Land Rover was 1 million cars a year by 2004. Jaguar was supposed to contribute 200,000 but the arrival of Land Rover meant that that number was less critical, as he foresaw that the two brands could share many resources.

Synergies between Jaguar and Land Rover were to be central to PAG’s development. The two brands had been under the same ownership before but there had been no direct connections, or sharing of systems and components. So this is where the story of Jaguar Land Rover, as we know it today, really begins. But in 2000 no one could have guessed where it would be in 2008.

.

* Ken Clayton, Jaguar: Rebirth of a Legend (London: Century, 1988).

3

Land Rover – cars for all reasons

LAND ROVER grew out of the Second World War. It is no secret that the original vehicle was inspired by the US Army Jeep but its creation had more to do with Britain’s economic and industrial situation in the late 1940s.

Rover was a conservative company which had built its first car in 1904. Its advertisements stated, with appropriate modesty, that a Rover was ‘One of Britain’s fine cars’. In 1945 it emerged from the six years of war, during which its Coventry and Solihull factories had made aero engines and components for aircraft and tanks, with a range of cars that had been designed in the early 1930s.

Government austerity measures restricted the number of cars that it could produce and where they could be sold. Steel supplies were linked to exports but aluminium was unrestricted and readily available, surplus from the aircraft industry. Rover needed a stop-gap to utilise the large Solihull plant until a new generation of saloon cars was ready and a free home market returned.

Land Rover publicity today perpetuates the romantic idea that Spencer and Maurice Wilks, the brothers who ran Rover, drew the first Land Rover with sticks in the sand and that it was knocked up in a workshop using aluminium recycled from wartime aeroplanes. A corporate film makes neat connections to the way today’s Defender, the linear descendant of the original Land Rover, is used for hedonistic purposes on tropical beaches and the all-aluminium construction of the 2013 Range Rover.

In reality, the Wilks Brothers had been planning a new small car using Birmabright aluminium alloy, which was produced by a company run by Maurice’s neighbour in Birmingham, and the Land Rover was intended as an agricultural vehicle, inspired by the need to replace the four-wheel drive war-surplus Jeep that he used on his farm in Anglesey, North Wales.

The first prototype actually used a redundant Jeep chassis, with the engine and a variety of parts from existing Rover saloons. The final product, with a Rover-designed steel chassis and simple, flat aluminium body panels, made its debut at the Amsterdam Motor Show in 1948 and subsequently was exhibited at agricultural shows up and down Britain.

The Wilks thought that there might be a market for 2,500 Land Rovers a year but at the end of its first 12 months they had sold 8,000. It was not just for farmers; buyers included builders, emergency services, government departments, and individuals based in countries where there were scarcely any roads.