Brothers Alan and Richard Jensen, having built custom car bodies since the late 1920s, took over the West Bromwich coachbuilding firm W J Smith & Sons in 1934 and renamed it Jensen Motors. Early work included one-off luxury bodies, among them a car built for Hollywood actor Clark Gable, and commercial vehicle bodywork. The Shaftesbury Street works was damaged in a German bombing raid on West Bromwich in November 1940.
A new factory on Kelvin Way, West Bromwich, opened in the mid-1950s, and became home to Jensen’s best-known cars: the Chrysler V8-powered C-V8, the Interceptor grand tourer, and its four-wheel-drive sibling, the FF. Jensen also built bodies under contract for other manufacturers, notably finishing Volvo P1800 bodyshells shipped down from Scotland in the 1960s, and producing Austin-Healey bodies.
Ownership passed to the Norcros Group in 1959, and the Jensen brothers themselves resigned in 1966 following disagreements. American distributor Kjell Qvale became majority shareholder in 1970 and installed Donald Healey as chairman, but the business could not survive the mid-1970s oil crisis and industrial disputes, ceasing trading in May 1976. A small revival built a handful more Interceptors at the same Kelvin Way site between 1983 and 1992, and a further, unrelated revival built the Jensen S-V8 at a new factory in Speke, Liverpool from 1998 until the company went into liquidation again in 2002.
