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It was the most mortifying moment in my career as an automotive journalist—so embarrassing that I hesitate to put it on record. I’d flown into Glasgow Airport late one night in early January 2023 and driven north to a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. Snow swirled in the beams of the headlamps, and the pale moonlight hinted at the vast, bleak moors and mountainsides around me. As I arrived at the Kingshouse Hotel, a colossal but curious and gentle red stag emerged from the darkness to greet me.
I’d come to test the inaugural Ineos Grenadier for Robb Report, and this seemed the perfect location to finally meet this rugged, idiosyncratic, much-delayed, and very British new off-roader. The full beauty of the landscape was revealed as dawn broke, and as I waited to collect the keys to my test vehicle, one of the other attendees asked me how my journey up had been. I told her about the encounter with the stag and asked if she was a journalist, too. She told me that she worked for Ineos. So I asked her what she did. She replied that she was the C.E.O.
Not recognizing the head of a carmaker—even a new one—is a sackable offense in my profession. In my defense, Lynn Calder had no prior history in the car industry and had been appointed with little fanfare just before the December holidays. Raised even farther north in Scotland, she had a stellar career in petrochemicals, energy, and private equity before joining the Ineos chemicals group in 2017, later being named C.E.O. of its composites business. Her boss, Ineos founder and second-richest man in the U.K. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, is no fan of convention, and that extends to both the car company he launched and the individual he has appointed to run it.
An adventurer when not building a privately held chemicals group with an annual revenue of $55 billion, Ratcliffe mourned the demise of the original, archaic Land Rover Defender after 68 years in production and had tried to buy the tooling to keep making it. Land Rover wouldn’t sell, so he created his own not- particularly modern successor, the idea coming to him in 2015 over a pint of beer in his own pub—from which the Grenadier takes its name—in London’s upmarket Belgravia neighborhood. His version has a similarly rudimentary off-road-optimized chassis, resolutely unelectrified BMW-sourced drivetrains, and an exterior design that proved too reminiscent of the Defender for Land Rover’s lawyers, who filed multiple lawsuits. Ratcliffe won, but then the pandemic struck, the supply-chain crisis followed, and eight years passed between his initial concept and my first drive in Scotland.
Calder’s involvement started as “an evening job,” she tells me at a later meetup, coming to board meetings and advising the first C.E.O. of Ineos Automotive, before Ratcliffe asked her to take over. “Going from just helping out to being C.E.O. was a huge shock,” she says. “We had a conversation where I was like, ‘Do we need an automotive person?’ And Jim’s view was, ‘Absolutely not. I want you to do it.’ ”
Ratcliffe was under no illusions about how tough it would be to establish a new premium carmaker. What he felt he needed was an Ineos person.
“At Ineos, we push everyone to the max,” Calder explains. “That’s just a cultural thing. And it comes from Jim, obviously: ‘Don’t tell me no until you have exhausted every possibility.’ I might look at a design feature and say, ‘That looks shit; I’m not accepting it.’ An automotive person’s first answer will always be, ‘There is no other option.’ Say that to an Ineos person and you’re going to have a hard day at the office.”
The challenge facing Calder when I first met her in Scotland would have daunted an industry lifer. The Grenadier was ready, but she had to develop a bunch of derivatives and at least two entirely separate new models, the first a complex E.V. with a range-extending gas engine. And she had to ensure the factory in Hambach, in eastern France, which Ineos took over from Mercedes-Benz, was on track to turn out 30,000 vehicles a year. Industry veterans know that production of a new car makes its engineering look easy.
Then she had to build a network through which to sell and service those cars to the standards expected by premium customers in over 50 countries and actually persuade us to buy Grenadiers—even in limited numbers—in a market already crowded with S.U.V.s from established prestige marques whose design and dynamics may be more attractive to modern tastes.
And, perhaps hardest of all, she had to do from the get-go what it took Land Rover decades to achieve: make cars that are simple and rugged enough to sell to aid agencies and survive in deserts and jungles, yet also desirable enough to justify the $146,995 asked for the new Detour, the first limited-edition Grenadier from Ineos’s nascent Arcane Works bespoke division.
“We’re not doing all this without experts,” Calder says. “We’d be idiots to do that. There are about four or five Ineos people in senior roles. Everyone else is from the automotive industry. I think I always felt like I could go into any business and know what I need to do. Automotive has been a humbling experience on that front because it’s not that simple.”
I asked her if I could write this profile when I first met her—out of genuine interest and not to compensate for not recognizing her—and she immediately agreed but asked for time to get her feet under the desk. Finding the minutes amid that daunting to-do list wasn’t easy, and Calder’s schedule was further complicated by constant commuting between her home and Ineos’s effective HQ in Monaco (where Ratcliffe lives), the corporate offices in London, the factory in France, the engineering team based at Magna Steyr in Austria that also builds the Mercedes-Benz G-Class, and the never-ending itinerary of new markets in which she has launched the Grenadier, from China to the U.S. Somehow she also finds time to compete in marathons and triathlons and trek to Mount Everest base camp.
You’ve got to explain to people that this car is different… And then they’re just going to be like, ‘Whoa…’
Some months passed between that first meeting and this interview. The situation is very different now but no less difficult. In the interim, Calder has both revealed Ineos Automotive’s second model, the Quartermaster pickup, and developed the electric Fusilier, then paused its development while E.V. sales flatlined. Production of the Grenadier was also halted for four months late last year when a critical supplier went bust.
The location and climate of the interview are very different from the Highlands. We meet on a glorious spring day at the Badminton Horse Trials, held on the 52,000-acre estate of the Duke of Beaufort in Gloucestershire in the southwest of England and one of the seven five-star events on the global equestrian calendar. Britain’s moneyed, landed horsey set is a prime demographic for the Grenadier, and Ineos is a lead sponsor. As I park the Grenadier I’ve been loaned, I see three others amid the expected armada of Range Rovers and Defenders, old and new. “We are so proud of our early adopters,” Calder says when I tell her. “They’re the ones who will give us credibility. But there are not an endless number of them. We need to expand.”
Calder’s Ineos corporate tough talk isn’t an act, and that line about expansion is delivered with a curtness and a laser focus that make me glad I’m interviewing her rather than reporting to her. Veteran car-industry figures who have worked with her like and respect her in equal measure. But as we walk and drive around Badminton, she displays precisely none of the hyper-alpha traits you’d expect of an Everest-scaling C.E.O., and you’d never guess that she’d written the event a big check. She seems aware that she’s in someone else’s world now—interested in the historic stables and tack rooms and the extraordinary competitors, equine and human, who occupy them. She spends several minutes with an elderly couple who asked about the Grenadier. She is easily distracted by dogs.
“My dad started off as a mechanic,” she tells me over coffee. “He bought a new car pretty much every six months, not because he was rich, but because he loved variety. He’s not with us anymore. He would probably hate cars today because they’re just not as mechanical anymore. The iPhone on wheels would not have been for him.”
“I wasn’t out there in the garage with him with a spanner, and I kind of regret that now,” she adds. “I’d have been much more helpful if I’d known what I was going to be doing. But by osmosis, I think what did rub off was the love of driving. So the day I turned 17, I was off. It was freedom.”
The ease and fluency with which Calder drives me around Badminton’s off-road test circuit, pitching the Grenadier into vertiginous descents and up slippery, muddy inclines while retaining enough mental-processing capacity to discuss the global automobile market will reassure you that there’s a real car person at the helm. She has ordered a Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS—though she divulges that only when asked what else she drives—and wears a Rolex Daytona: both the choices of a proper, knowing car enthusiast.
You might need to be an enthusiast to want what she’s selling. From the exterior styling by Ineos Group design director Toby Ecuyer—who had previously worked on Ratcliffe’s yachts but had never done a car—to the interior’s aircraft-like overhead banks of switches, which deliberately reject the Tesla-led trend to move all functions to a touch screen, it defies automotive convention. Same for how it drives: It is comfortable and rides well, but it has proper, heavy, deliberate off-road steering.
“You’ve got to explain to people that this car is different,” she says. “They might say, ‘I like S.U.V.s, so I’m going to get out of my Cayenne and get in this.’ And then they’re just going to be like, ‘Whoa… ’ ”
“But you can still drive it perfectly easily,” she adds. “And selling 30,000 cars a year, I don’t need millions of people to say they love it.”
That idiosyncrasy is central to her plan, which has the hero Grenadier cutting through a sea of cookie- cutter S.U.V.s and establishing the Ineos brand before the marque eventually follows up with the smaller, less polarizing Fusilier. Initial rarity is an attraction for buyers who like to swim against the current. “Just having something that nobody else has,” as Calder puts it.
Then there’s the very British concept of luxury that the Grenadier displays: a functional object made unnecessarily well, its desirability based on its credibility. Think Belstaff motorcycle wear, a company that Ratcliffe also owns. “I wouldn’t call us a luxury brand,” Calder insists. “I would call us a premium brand based on quality engineering.”
And lastly, the road map leverages Ineos’s clout. The group’s huge sports-sponsorship deals—from the Mercedes F1 team to pro cycling to Ratcliffe’s purchase of a large stake in Manchester United—have given its automotive subsidiary a global brand awareness way beyond its means.
Despite the headwinds, the plan seems to be working. As Calder expected, the U.S. is comfortably the Grenadier’s biggest market, accounting for about 60 to 65 percent of revenues. The private company does not release sales figures, but it appears to be closing in on the $1 billion mark. Around 10,000 Americans each year are buying the Grenadier—the vast majority paying cash, loading around $20,000 of options into an $80,000 top-spec model and adding it to a garage that typically already contains at least three cars. But for tariffs, it would have been more. The Grenadier was hit with a 25 percent import duty, which was reduced to 15 percent following the trade deal between the E.U. and the U.S. Ineos has increased the price of the Grenadier by only 5 percent and the Quartermaster by 10 and is swallowing the rest. Without the tariffs and the uncertainty, Ineos had hoped to sell 15,000 vehicles in the U.S. annually by now and for the pickup to account for 10 percent of sales rather than 5.
Ineos remains “super-focused” on the U.S., Calder says, and expects to hit that 15,000 mark next year. But the cars will need to catch on in all of its 50 markets if the venture is to succeed. Ratcliffe has invested too much financial and reputational capital for it to fail. It is not an easy task, and it has not had the smoothest of starts. The pressure on Calder is intense. But talking to her, I get the clear sense that she’s more than capable of executing her plan—and then some. Driving her, as she puts it, “is the possibility of what you can do with your life if you just take the brakes off.”
Ben Oliver writes about cars and the car industry for newspapers and magazines around the world. His work has brought him awards including Journalist of the Year, the AA Environment Award and the…
