Jaguar Cars Ltd, known simply as Jaguar ( /ˈdʒæɡjuː.ər/ jag-ew-ər), is a British luxury car manufacturer, headquartered in Whitley, Coventry, England. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Indian company Tata Motors Ltd, it is operated as part of the Jaguar Land Rover business.
Jaguar was founded as the Swallow Sidecar Company by Sir William Lyons in 1922, originally making motorcycle sidecars before evolving into passenger cars. The name was changed to Jaguar after WWII to avoid the unfavourable connotations of the SS initials. Following a merger with the British Motor Corporation in 1968, subsequently subsumed by Leyland, which itself was later nationalised as British Leyland, Jaguar was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, and became a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index until it was acquired by Ford in 1989. Jaguar has, in recent years, manufactured cars for the Prime Minister, the most recent delivery being of an XJ model on 11 May 2010. The company also holds Royal Warrants from HM Queen Elizabeth II and HRH Prince Charles.
Jaguar cars today are designed in Jaguar Land Rover's engineering centres at the Whitley plant in Coventry and at their Gaydon site in Warwickshire, and are manufactured in Jaguar's Castle Bromwich assembly plant near Birmingham.
The Swallow Sidecar Company was founded in 1922 by two motorcycle enthusiasts, William Lyons and William Walmsley. In 1935 the SS Jaguar name first appeared on a 2.5 litre saloon, sports models of which were the SS 90 and SS 100.
Cash was short after the Second World War and Jaguar sold to Rubery Owen the plant and premises of Motor Panels, a pressed steel body manufacturing company which had been acquired in the late 1930s when growth prospects had seemed more secure. Nevertheless, Jaguar achieved relative commercial success with their early post war models; times were also tough for other Coventry-based auto-makers and the company was able to buy from John Black's Standard Motor Company the plant where Standard had built the six-cylinder engines it had been supplying to Jaguar.
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