You do rather wonder whether, if he’d had his time again, Sir Jim Ratcliffe would have bothered with creating a whole new car company. Car design, even for vast OEMs who have been doing it for decades and come with sky high reputations, is not easy. To do it from scratch, with your own money and still tick every box required by every legislative body around the world is almost impossibly hard.
But for Ineos, it then got a whole lot harder. The car had to be developed through the worst global pandemic in 100 years and was launched just months after Russia attempted the greatest landgrab Europe has seen since World War Two with all the economic fallout that entailed. Then there was the chip crisis, which near enough floored far bigger, better resourced and more established rivals.
One self-inflicted injury was launching the Grenadier before it was ready, resulting in some pretty painful reflections in the press. When Andrew English reviewed it for us he commented ‘if Land Rover, Jeep, Mercedes-Benz or Isuzu had presented a vehicle with this number of schoolboy faults and errors, we’d have had their guts for garters.’ Which can’t have made for easy reading. The EV version, the Fusilier, is now on the back burner fearing lack of demand for such cars and, just when things seemed to be smoothing out, its seat supplier, Recaro, collapsed shutting production for a third of a year. I cannot imagine – and I meant that in the most literal sense – how difficult establishing this car in the marketplace must have been.
