Ineos, the company founded and run by the British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, will build an electric version of its new Grenadier off-road vehicle in Austria.
The electric version of the 4×4 will be developed with the Canadian car parts manufacturer Magna and production is scheduled to start in 2026.
The decision means that the UK has missed out on building a second Ineos vehicle, after Ratcliffe, a vocal Brexit backer who is resident in Monaco for tax purposes, chose a French factory for the original Grenadier.
It came as AMTE Power, a small producer of lithium ion batteries, separately said it was considering building its first factory capable of production at the scale of gigawatt hours a year in the US, rather than in Dundee as previously planned. The company is considering shifting manufacturing from the UK to the US to benefit from American subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, it told Sky News.
The AMTE Power chief executive, Alan Hollis, said: “Unless we make the UK a competitive place for battery manufacturers, we probably won’t end up with a battery manufacturing industry in the UK.”
Ratcliffe built Ineos into one of the UK’s biggest private companies by taking over chemicals businesses, but he has since used its financial heft to branch out into a series of unrelated businesses ranging from sports clubs to clothing, as well as the manufacture of the Grenadier.
The businessman, whose fortune is worth £6bn according to the Sunday Times, has put in a bid to take over Manchester United football club. His existing sports clubs include the French football club Nice, the Ineos Britannia sailing team and the former Team Sky cycling team, renamed the Ineos Grenadiers to promote the off-roader.
The first deliveries of the Grenadier began from a factory in France in December, about nine months later than initially planned because of difficulties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ratcliffe named the Grenadier after the historic London pub where he first came up with the idea. He later bought the pub, located down a mews street in Belgravia, one of London’s most expensive areas.
However, despite the British associations of the name, the vehicles have been built elsewhere. Ineos bought a plant in Hambach, eastern France, to make the Grenadier, to the disappointment of people in Bridgend, south Wales, where the company had initially planned to step in to replace Ford, which closed an engine plant there. On announcing the Bridgend deal Ineos had said it wanted to “retain the Britishness”.
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The choice of Magna means that Ineos has not attempted to build a second car from scratch, relying instead on a manufacturer that already builds electric vehicles for companies such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Mini. The Graz factory builds electric SUVs including the Jaguar I-Pace and the Fisker Ocean.
Magna has been working on vehicle engineering with Ineos since 2018. Building the original Grenadier had cost €506m (£450m) in losses up to 2021, before sales began.
Lynn Calder, the Ineos Automotive chief executive, said in a statement: “Deepening our collaboration [with Magna] is a natural next step as we use the Grenadier as a springboard for our continued growth as a global automotive brand with our second model line.”
