This page collects news about the car industry in the United Kingdom: model launches, the plants that build them, and changes of ownership. The industry has two halves that barely touch. One is volume assembly, most of it for export: Nissan at Sunderland, the country’s largest car plant, Mini at Oxford, Toyota at Burnaston, Jaguar and Land Rover at Solihull and Halewood. The other is small-batch and high-value, running from Rolls-Royce at Goodwood and Bentley at Crewe down to firms that deliver a few dozen cars a year. Sitting across both is the motorsport engineering cluster in the corridor north-west of London, where seven of the ten Formula 1 teams are based and where much of the world’s racing and prototype work gets contracted out.
Ownership runs almost entirely outside Britain. Jaguar and Land Rover belong to India’s Tata Motors, Mini and Rolls-Royce to BMW, MG to China’s SAIC, Lotus to Geely, McLaren to CYVN Holdings of Abu Dhabi, and Vauxhall to Stellantis. Aston Martin is the largest maker still headquartered and listed in Britain, though its shareholder register is international. The full tree, and how the British case compares with the rest of the continent, is in Europe’s car brands.
