Alan and Richard Jensen built a boat-tailed sports body on an early Austin Seven in 1926, and went on to design the Avon Standard two-seaters and Wolseley Hornet specials. In 1931 they moved to W. J. Smith & Sons, lorry body makers at West Bromwich, and named their work Jensen Motors. After Smith died in 1934 they took control and renamed the company Jensen Motors Limited. They built customised bodies for Morris, Singer, Standard and Wolseley, and in 1934 designed a car for the film actor Clark Gable on a Ford V8 chassis.
After the war Jensen bodied the Austin A40 Sports, designed by Eric Neale, which debuted at the 1949 London Motor Show. In 1952 BMC rejected Jensen’s design for a new sports car in favour of Donald Healey’s, but Jensen won the contract to build the bodies of the Austin-Healey 100 and the “big Healey” cars, and by the end of 1960 Austin-Healeys occupied about 350 of the 850 men in its factory. It also built the bodies of the four-wheel-drive Austin Gipsy in the 1950s. In 1960 it won a contract from Volvo to finish the P1800, with shells made by Pressed Steel in Scotland.
The Jensen Interceptor of 1966 had a body designed by Touring and first built by Vignale. Jensen ceased trading in 1976.
