Jaguar began life in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company, founded by William Lyons and William Walmsley in Blackpool to build motorcycle sidecars. The business moved to Holbrook Lane, Coventry in 1928 as demand outgrew its original premises, and by 1934 had become SS Cars Ltd. The SS Jaguar name first appeared on a 2.5-litre saloon in 1935, and in 1945, keen to distance the company from the unfortunate associations of the ‘SS’ initials after the war, the business was renamed Jaguar Cars Ltd outright.
Jaguar leased the Browns Lane plant from Daimler in 1951, and by 1960 had bought Daimler itself from BSA, giving Jaguar its own historic luxury sub-brand. Browns Lane remained Jaguar’s main production site until 2005, though Castle Bromwich in Birmingham, originally a WWII shadow aircraft factory, had already begun building Jaguars in 1977 and became the primary plant from 1998. Castle Bromwich then carried Jaguar production alone from 2005 until internal-combustion manufacturing ended there in May 2024, ahead of Jaguar’s relaunch as an all-electric marque, with production consolidating at Solihull’s Lode Lane plant, shared with Land Rover. Design and engineering have been based at Whitley, Coventry since the mid-1980s, though Whitley itself has never been a production plant.
The company passed through Ford ownership from 1989 to 2008 before being acquired by Tata Motors in 2008, forming Jaguar Land Rover.