Ineos Automotive, the petrochemical giant’s bold foray into off-road vehicles, launched the Grenadier in 2022 with a clear mission: to build a no-nonsense, mechanically sympathetic 4×4 that embodied the spirit of the original Land Rover Defender before it went soft. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Manchester United co-owner and Britain’s richest man, poured hundreds of millions into the project, buying the old Smart factory in Hambach, France, and promising a rugged, repairable truck for farmers, overlanders, and purists who felt abandoned by JLR’s lifestyle-oriented Defender.
Three years on, the dream is showing serious cracks.
Production of the Grenadier and its Quartermaster pick-up variant has rarely run smoothly. In late 2024, the collapse of key supplier SAS Automotive halted assembly for an entire month, exposing how fragile a start-up supply chain can be when you’re trying to build 25,000 vehicles a year with mostly new partners. Deliveries that were already stretching beyond 18 months grew even longer, frustrating customers who had ploughed five-figure deposits into a vehicle marketed as “built on purpose.”
This year brought a more public embarrassment: a recall of over 7,300 Grenadiers worldwide because the doors could open while driving. The fault—corrosion on the door-check strap leading to potential detachment—was serious enough for regulators in the UK, EU, and Australia to mandate fixes. Owners reported having to leave vehicles at dealers for weeks while replacement parts trickled in. For a brand that sold itself on old-school robustness, the irony was painful.
Now comes the bleakest signal yet. Ineos Automotive is cutting staff—substantially. Sources inside the company suggest up to 20–25% of the roughly 1,500-strong workforce could go before Christmas 2025, with redundancies already under consultation in the UK and France. The Hambach plant is reportedly moving to a single-shift pattern, and the commercial-vehicle division (which includes the chassis-cab and forthcoming hydrogen trials) is being sharply downsized.
The official line is “rightsizing for current demand,” but the subtext is clear: the Grenadier has not sold as well as hoped. List prices starting above £65,000 (plus VAT for commercial buyers) in a post-Covid, high-interest-rate world have proved a tough sell against used Defenders and the cheaper, more refined Toyota Land Cruiser. Early quality niggles—leaks, electrical gremlins, and that door recall—have damaged word-of-mouth among the very traditionalists Ineos courted.
Ratcliffe’s deep pockets mean Ineos Automotive is not about to vanish, but the Grenadier story is rapidly shifting from plucky British underdog to a cautionary tale about the difficulty of resurrecting an “analogue” vehicle in a digital, regulated, and brutally cost-conscious age. The old Defender died for a reason. Its self-styled successor may yet survive—but only after swallowing some very modern medicine.