Coventry's car industry, from Daimler to Jaguar Land Rover

Bicycles to cars

Coventry's skilled workers moved from watchmaking into the cycle trade in the nineteenth century. By the late 1890s bicycle makers were turning to motor cars. The Daimler Company built the first motor car in Coventry in 1897. The city quickly became one of the main centres of the British motor industry.

Through the early and mid twentieth century the names piled up: Alvis, Armstrong Siddeley, Daimler, Humber, Jaguar, Riley, Rootes, Rover, Singer, Standard, Swift and Triumph all built cars in Coventry.

The great factories

The Standard Motor Company opened a car factory at Canley in 1918 on the site of a former munitions works. It later built Triumph cars until British Leyland closed it in August 1980, one of the hardest blows to the city in that decade. The Ryton factory just outside the city, built by the Rootes Group, closed in December 2006 with the loss of more than 2,000 jobs.

Coventry was also a capital of machine tools. Alfred Herbert Ltd became one of the largest machine tool companies in the world before it stopped trading in 1983; its founder's gifts paid for the Herbert Art Gallery.

Jaguar Land Rover and the electric turn

Jaguar Land Rover kept its headquarters and engineering centre at Whitley, a site that was once an airfield, an aircraft factory and a missile factory. London's black cabs are made by LEVC, which moved from its Holyhead Road factory to a new plant at Ansty Park in 2017 and launched the range-extended electric TX taxi that year.

Today the city's motor industry is being rebuilt around batteries, with the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre at Baginton and a gigafactory planned on the old airport next door.

Seeing it for yourself

The Coventry Transport Museum holds the largest collection of British-made road transport in public ownership, including many cars built in the city. Humber Hub is about 2 miles by road from the museum and about 2 miles from JLR at Whitley.