A Mumbai-based group bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford in 2008. The years since have brought record output, a sharp setback and a 2025 cyberattack.
Jaguar Land Rover is owned by Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles of India, which bought both brands from Ford in 2008 in a sale completed on 2 June 2008. JLR employs about 33,000 people and is headquartered in Coventry. A cyberattack in September 2025 cost it 196 million pounds.
Jaguar never turned a profit in the Ford years. In 2008 Ford sold the brand, along with Land Rover, to Tata Motors of India, a group that had entered the vehicle business in 1954 by building Daimler lorries at Jamshedpur. Seventeen years after that sale, a cyberattack stopped production and retail operations at both brands and cost the business 196 million pounds.
Who owns Jaguar Land Rover?
Jaguar Land Rover is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, formerly just Tata Motors, which belongs to India's Tata Group. The immediate parent is TML Holdings in Singapore. The company is headquartered at Whitley, Coventry, and employs about 33,000 people, making it one of the largest car employers in the United Kingdom.
The Tata name can confuse. A demerger took effect on 1 October 2025: the commercial vehicles arm was renamed Tata Motors, and the original Tata Motors, which kept the passenger car business and JLR, became Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles.
| Date | Jaguar | Land Rover |
|---|---|---|
| 1968 | Merged into British Leyland, via British Motor Holdings | Part of British Leyland |
| 1984 | Floated on the London Stock Exchange as a separate company | British Leyland ownership ends |
| 1989 to 1990 | Bought by Ford; listing removed on 28 February 1990 | A BMW subsidiary, through Rover Group |
| 2000 | Ford's Premier Automotive Group | Bought by Ford from BMW and added to the Premier Automotive Group |
| 2008 | Sold to Tata Motors | Sold to Tata Motors |
| 2013 | Merged with Land Rover into one operating company | Merged with Jaguar into one operating company |
Jaguar never turned a profit in the Ford years.
How did Tata come to buy Jaguar and Land Rover?
Ford announced on 11 June 2007 that it planned to sell both brands and hired Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and HSBC. On 26 March 2008 it agreed to sell them to Tata Motors, and the sale completed on 2 June 2008.
Tata had plenty of rivals. Private equity firms including Alchemy Partners, TPG Capital, Ripplewood Holdings, Cerberus Capital Management and One Equity Partners expressed interest, as did a consortium of Mahindra and Apollo Management. The JCB chairman, Anthony Bamford, had been interested in August 2006 but backed out on learning that Land Rover was part of the deal. Mahindra withdrew on Christmas Eve 2007, citing complexity. On 1 January 2008 Ford named Tata the preferred bidder, with backing from the Transport and General Workers' Union and Amicus as well as Ford. Reuters reported on 18 March 2008 that a US$3 billion loan from Citigroup and JP Morgan would fund the purchase.
On 18 January 2008 Tata set up a British-registered subsidiary, Jaguar Land Rover Limited, to hold the purchase. The deal also brought the rights to three other British names: Daimler, and the dormant Lanchester and Rover marques. Ford had bought the Rover name from BMW in 2006 for around 6 million pounds.
Who is Tata, and why cars?
Tata's commercial vehicle business dates to 1954, when a joint venture with Mercedes-Benz built a plant at Jamshedpur for Daimler lorries. In the 2000s the company bought Daewoo's South Korean truck unit in 2004 and took over Hispano Carrocera, a Spanish bus builder, in stages from 2005 to 2009. The Tata Ace, launched in May 2005, was India's first indigenously developed sub-one-tonne minitruck.
How did Jaguar and Land Rover end up in the same company?
Both brands spent part of their history inside British Leyland, and they were reunited by Ford. Jaguar began as the Swallow Sidecar Company, founded in 1922 by William Lyons and William Walmsley, and the Jaguar name first appeared as a model in September 1935. The company took the name Jaguar Cars Limited on 23 March 1945. Land Rover dates to the 1940s.
Jaguar's sports cars, the XK120, XK140, XK150 and E-Type, built its reputation, and the marque won Le Mans in 1951 and 1953, with Ecurie Ecosse adding two more wins in 1956 and 1957. In 1965 the British Motor Corporation bought Pressed Steel, Jaguar's body supplier, and William Lyons, worried about body supplies and about who would succeed him, agreed to a merger. That led to British Motor Holdings in 1966 and British Leyland in 1968, nationalised in 1975.
Jaguar was floated off on the London Stock Exchange in July 1984. Sir John Egan, installed as chairman in 1980, laid off about a third of its roughly 10,000 staff and pushed quality, and commentators later noted he leaned on an elderly model range with its development costs already written off. Ford bought it in 1989.
Ford's period brought the S-Type in 1999 and the X-Type in 2001, and in 2000 Land Rover arrived from BMW, which had broken up Rover Group. The two brands then shared dealerships in many countries and a common management structure, though the only shared production facility was Halewood. The 2013 restructuring finally merged Jaguar Cars into Jaguar Land Rover as a single design, manufacturing and sales company.
Two other legacies came along. Jaguar bought the Daimler marque in 1960 from BSA and used it from the late 1960s as a name for its most luxurious saloons, and JLR also retains the dormant Daimler, Lanchester and Rover names. Jaguar has supplied cars to British prime ministers since the late 1970s, the latest delivery being an XJ in May 2010, and it has carried royal warrants under both Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III.
How did Jaguar Land Rover perform under Tata?
For the first several years, well. In the year to 31 March 2013 it sold 374,636 vehicles, and in 2013 a record 425,006. In 2016 it became the biggest car manufacturer in the United Kingdom, producing 489,923 cars and overtaking Nissan.
Investment rose with sales. JLR committed 355 million pounds in September 2011 to a new engine plant at the i54 site outside Wolverhampton, which opened in October 2014 as the 500 million pound Engine Manufacturing Centre. In 2012 it agreed with Chery to put an initial US$2.78 billion into a Chinese joint venture, which built a plant at Changshu with trial production from April 2014 and potential capacity of 130,000 vehicles a year. Chief executive Ralf Speth said JLR put 3 billion pounds into product creation in 2013.
The 2018 and 2019 setback
In April 2018 JLR announced 1,000 temporary contract job cuts in the West Midlands, citing a sales slump linked to diesel tax uncertainty and Brexit. By mid-2019 it was struggling, and Tata Motors cut the book value of its JLR investment by US$3.9 billion. Much of the problem was a 50 per cent fall in sales in China during 2018. Recovery followed: a third-quarter pre-tax profit of 156 million pounds against a 395 million pound loss in the second quarter, with China sales up 24 per cent and worldwide Evoque sales up 54.6 per cent.
Other spending was aimed at the British supply chain. In March 2011 JLR signed over 2 billion pounds of supply contracts with UK companies for the Evoque and hired another 1,500 staff at Halewood. In September 2013 it announced 1,700 more jobs and 1.5 billion pounds of investment at Solihull, to prepare aluminium chassis for future models, and a 100 million pound research centre at the University of Warwick in Coventry, the National Automotive Innovation Campus.
Tata said it was open to a partnership with another company if it kept control of the business. It ruled out a sale of JLR.
What happened in the 2025 cyberattack and after?
On 2 September 2025 JLR said a cyberattack had severely disrupted its operations and forced it to pause all production and retail. On 24 September it extended the pause to 1 October 2025. By 22 October it was slowly restarting parts of its production. Accounts published in November 2025 put the cost at 196 million pounds.
It followed a difficult spring. In April 2025, after President Donald Trump imposed tariffs, JLR said it would hold back shipments to the US. In May 2025 Tata Motors' finance chief, PB Balaji, was named as the next chief executive, taking over in November 2025 from Adrian Mardell, who was retiring after three years. Mardell followed Thierry Bollore, chief executive from 2020 to 2022, and Speth, who led from 2010 to 2020.
What are Jaguar's electric plans?
On 15 February 2021 JLR announced that all Jaguar-badged cars would be fully electric by 2025. In May 2024 Castle Bromwich in Birmingham, formerly the main Jaguar assembly plant, ended production of complete cars. It continues to supply pressed steel body panels for Jaguar cars built elsewhere.
Jaguar cars have long been built in several places. The Jaguar XE became the first Jaguar assembled at Solihull in 2014, followed by the F-Pace in 2016, while the XF has been built in Pune and the XE and XF in Changshu.
Where this goes next
On 20 May 2026 JLR and Stellantis put their names to a memorandum of understanding, under which they would look for ways to work together on product and technology development in the United States. Tata Motors already has a joint venture with Stellantis that makes engines and vehicle components.
Other items on the horizon: Balaji's leadership, which began in November 2025; a planned Jaguar Land Rover India plant in Tamil Nadu; and the electric target for Jaguar badges. In 2023 JLR also set up an open innovation hub in Tel Aviv to work with Israeli technology companies on supply chains, sustainability and connected digital services.
What does it mean if you drive a Jaguar or Land Rover?
Where a car is built depends on the model. These are the sites the company lists:
- Solihull, West Midlands: the Jaguar F-Pace alongside the Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Velar.
- Halewood, Merseyside: Land Rover Discovery Sport and Range Rover Evoque.
- Nitra, Slovakia: Land Rover Discovery and Defender.
- Pune, India: Jaguar XF, Range Rover Evoque and Range Rover Velar.
- Changshu, China, through Chery Jaguar Land Rover: Evoque, Discovery Sport, Jaguar XE and XF.
- Itatiaia, Brazil: Evoque and Discovery Sport.
Many of these sites have a long past. Solihull began as an aircraft engine plant in the Second World War, became a Rover plant, made Rover passenger cars until 1982 and has built every Land Rover Series, Defender and full-size Range Rover. Halewood was a Ford plant, best known for the Escort, before being handed to Jaguar in 2000 for the X-Type. Castle Bromwich built Spitfires during the war. Whitley, the Coventry headquarters, was bought from Peugeot in the 1980s and had been a First World War airfield.
Engineering is shared. Jaguar and Land Rover both draw on engineering centres at Gaydon in Warwickshire and Whitley in Coventry, and the Special Vehicle Operations team has been based at Ryton-on-Dunsmore since 2016. The Ingenium family of petrol and diesel engines is built at Wolverhampton. The company also bought Bowler Motors in 2019, which became part of SVO.
