23 December 2025 | General News
The Jaguars Drivers’ Club was invited to join JLR employees and Matthew Davis of the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust (JDHT) at the Solihull plant on Friday 19th December 2025 to mark the end of an era for Jaguar Cars, the end of the production of Jaguar’s F-Pace SUV. The F-Pace was bult at Solihull alongside JLR’s Land Rover and Range Rover products with production starting back in 2015. The event was celebrating ten years of F-Pace production at Solihull with the track workers assembled to see the final F-Pace, an SVR, come down the line.
Many of them had worked on the line for the whole ten years of its life so this was an emotional day for many of them. F-Pace wasn’t the first Jaguar to be built at Solihull, this honour went to the XE, launched in 2015 although the F-Pace followed soon after, being launched in 2015 at the Frankfurt Motor Show with production starting in 2016.
Following normal Jaguar policy of ‘First and Last’ the keys to the final F-Pace were ritually handed over to Matthew Davis. While JLR are still producing petrol and diesel powered Land Rover and Ranger Rover vehicles, this was the last Jaguar, powered by an internal combustion engine so it is only fitting that it goes into the JDHT Collection as a mileston in the history of the Company.
The assembled track workers, directors, members of the press and yours truly, had their photos taken with the car, all the time JLR employee Dave Davies was sitting in the driving seat and appears in all the photos even if just as a shady figure behind the windscreen. He then drove the last F-Pace off the line, round to the display area, to join JDHT’s XE and Lady Lyons' 1937 SS Jaguar Saloon.
Plant Director Ged Lenehan, Rachael Payne, head of training and leader of the #OURJAGUAR programme, and Tom Bury, Product & Services Marketing Director all all gave their thanks to the workforce for their work on the line over the past ten years. Matthew Davis gave them a fifteen minute whiz through ninety years of the Jaguar marque, and there was a definite ‘ooh’ of recognition when the image of Sir William’s design for the first SS1 went up on the screen, very long bonnet, low curved roof, which is the image that popped into my mind when I first saw Type 00.
For anyone out there who thinks Jaguar is leaving their past behind and not interested in its history, the presence of the Clubs at this event and Matthew Davis presenting on the history to the workforce, nails that idea firmly in its coffin.
Tony Merrygold
Chairman, Jaguar Drivers' Club
