A British billionaire’s new car company is setting up headquarters in Raleigh
What happens when a billionaire financier’s favorite automaker discontinues his dearest design? He starts a car company and makes his own.
In 2016, Land Rover redesigned the original Defender, replacing its much-beloved, blocky build with a more zaftig successor. The rugged off-road vehicle had been unchanged for more than three decades. It was the standard of utilitarian elegance by which scores of later 4-by-4s were measured. Its aesthetic overhaul marked the end of an era.
A year later, Jim Ratcliffe was still peeved about it. The British billionaire behind INEOS Group — a multinational chemicals company — had been a Defender devotee before its restyling. In his favorite London bar, Ratcliffe mourned what he considered the SUV’s demise.
“He was lamenting the fact that he just couldn’t see the vehicle that he would want to buy that would really tick all the boxes for him,” said Greg Clark, an executive vice president at INEOS. “He happened to be sitting in The Grenadier pub in London, one of his favorite pubs and — all good ideas start over beers — kind of thought, ‘This is not only frustrating to me, but I actually see a gap in the market.’”
Clark spoke with The News & Observer from his Raleigh home where he’s just settled to oversee the North American rollout of Ratcliffe’s beer-inspired brainchild. INEOS Automotive will soon debut “the spiritual successor,” as Ratcliffe says, to Land Rover’s original Defender. It’s called the Grenadier after the pub in which Ratcliffe had his epiphany.
INEOS Automotive’s Raleigh headquarters will employ about 25 people by the end of 2022, Clark said, and “40 to 50 in the next couple of years.” Manufacturing will begin in Europe, but the company hopes to eventually establish a second production facility in North America. Clark could not confirm if North Carolina was in contention for those plans.
“We’re still studying that in the background,” he said. “That’s a different work stream for us that may involve North Carolina but may also involve some of the other adjacent states.”
For its headquarters, INEOS Automotive considered 12 locations, including Atlanta and Houston, before settling on Raleigh.
“Atlanta was attractive because of its size, and also because Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are already headquartered there,” Clark said.
But Raleigh represented a market rife with 4-by-4 enthusiasts.
“North Carolina always punches above its weight in terms of sales and interest in 4-by-4 vehicles, off-road vehicles,” Clark said. “...In my six months here, you know, you can’t go down the street without tripping over 4-Runners and Broncos and Wranglers and Land Cruisers. And so, proximity to that customer, our target customer, was so key.”
Wait, is that a Land Rover?
True to his mission, Ratcliffe’s Grenadier is easily mistaken for the original Land Rover Defender. It has all the trappings of the latter’s iconic design.
So similar are the two cars that Land Rover has twice taken legal action to stymie the Grenadier’s production.
“It was most hotly contested back in the UK, where it went to the High Court twice,” said Clark, who worked for Land Rover as a brand director before joining INEOS last year. “Land Rover effectively claimed that the Grenadier was too similar to the Defender.”
Despite its fervent protestations, Land Rover lost the case and a later appeal.
“You can’t copyright a silhouette,” Clark said. “The vehicle is boxy by its construction. You put a body on a frame, you move the wheels to the far corners, you create interior passenger space and you make it utilitarian, the vehicle is going to be boxy.”
Having overcome legal opposition, INEOS is barreling forward with plans to launch its line of vehicles by the end of 2022. The first batch will supply European markets, Clark said, but Grenadiers will appear in the U.S. by 2023. After production ramps up, the company will manufacture about 35,000 cars per year, a third of which it will sell in North America.
While other off-road vehicles are more prolific, none capture the Defender’s impalpable elegance as well as the Grenadier, according to Ratcliffe.
“Nothing kind of fills this niche of being super capable off road, but also offering kind of the grown-up refinement that somebody like (Ratcliffe) or his counterparts or his friends would expect,” Clark said.
The company has not released its target price point for the Grenadier, Clark said, but about 15,000 would-be customers have joined a waiting list to buy one. The first several thousand trucks will feature a traditional gas-powered engine, but INEOS hopes to introduce a line of electric vehicles in the coming years.
After first producing “a more conventional battery-powered electric vehicle,” Clark said, INEOS Automotive hopes to pioneer a hydrogen-based electrochemical platform. The company is investing $2.5 billion to research hydrogen fuel cells, which it thinks will solve one of the electric vehicle industry’s greatest shortcomings.
“Our typical (customer) wants to go somewhere — hunting, shooting, fishing, hiking, off to the Caribbean, camping for a week,” Clark said. “You inherently don’t want to be tethered to a charging infrastructure for that, right? So that’s where we feel internal combustion engine and, longer-term, hydrogen fuel cells answer that question.”
To learn more about the Grenadier, or to reserve one, visit ineosgrenadier.com. INEOS will sell its vehicles via area dealerships, a spokesperson said, but the company has not yet announced its retail partners.
This story was originally published April 22, 2022 at 9:25 AM.
