Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos Automotive is considering moving production of its Grenadier 4×4 from France to the United States after the company reported a loss of €913m last year, with revenues down 24 per cent.
Lynn Calder, chief executive of Ineos Automotive, said a relocation of Grenadier production to the US was “under great consideration”. She argued that, irrespective of trade tariffs, it would follow the industrial mantra of “build where you sell”.
The company reported revenues of €608m, down from €799m in 2024, a fall blamed on President Trump’s tariffs on European carmakers. Its pre-tax losses over its first three years in business now stand at €1.73bn.
About 65 per cent of Ineos’s vehicles are exported to America. Those exports initially attracted tariffs of as much as 50 per cent. The Grenadier is now subject to tariffs of 15 per cent, while its sibling, the Quartermaster pick-up truck, carries a 25 per cent levy.
Deliveries fell to 9,600 in the year, indicating an average wholesale price of about €63,000 per vehicle. The company has previously hoped for annual production of 25,000 vehicles.
“It was a very painful 12 months,” Calder said.
The loss also reflected the cost of laying off about 500 people, nearly a third of the company’s staff, in a restructuring, and a write-off of its investment in the Fusilier hybrid vehicle.
The Fusilier project has been shelved for the time being because of a lack of demand. The write-off of its development costs totalled €338m, the largest single item in the accounts.
Ineos Automotive reported a loss of €125m before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, excluding €62m of restructuring costs. Further depreciation writedowns and €270m of interest charges added to its losses.
Calder said the business wanted to change tack on the Fusilier and drop its plan to build a new vehicle from the ground up. Instead it would use an established 4×4 hybrid manufacturing platform.
The Grenadier is built at a former Mercedes-Benz facility in Hambach, a French town near the German border. Ratcliffe chose the site after scouting for a production location in Britain.
Calder said that if Grenadier production moved to the US it was unlikely Ineos would close the Hambach factory, because it could in time become the production centre for the Fusilier, a vehicle for the European market.
Ineos Automotive has previously criticised the handling of the trade dispute. In a statement in March 2025, when the US announced tariffs on the car industry, Calder called for “urgent and direct political intervention on tariffs” from European Union politicians.
The Grenadier is the personal project of Ratcliffe, the Ineos chemicals billionaire and co-owner of Manchester United. He believes there is a gap in the market for an old-school off-roader following Jaguar Land Rover’s decision to retire the old Land Rover Defender.
In March 2025 the company recalled 7,000 Grenadiers in the US after reports that doors opened while driving. Five months later Ratcliffe sold the Belstaff clothing brand to Castore.
Calder said sales this year were on schedule to recover by 15 per cent. That has included fleet sales to the Italian and Austrian militaries, to security forces in eastern Europe and to the RNLI in the UK.
In May Business Matters reported that the Grenadier had entered the race for the Ministry of Defence’s tender to replace the British Army’s Land Rovers, a contract worth an initial £900m.
