Jaguar is a brand of Tata Motors.

104 years, three owners

The year is coloured by whoever held it at the time.

1. 1922 The business that became Jaguar began in September 1922, when William Lyons and William Walmsley formed the Swallow Sidecar Company in Blackpool on a bank overdraft of a thousand pounds. Sidecars gave way to car bodies and then to cars; the first Jaguar-badged car appeared in 1935 and the company itself took the Jaguar name in 1945.
2. 1989 Ford bought Jaguar in 1989, ending sixty-seven years in which the marque had answered to nobody in Detroit. Jaguar plc's board agreed a 2.5 billion dollar cash offer on 2 November 1989, at 13.345 dollars a share, ending a bidding contest with General Motors that had begun when Ford said in September it would seek a 15 per cent stake; Ford already held about 13 per cent. The offer was only possible because the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Nicholas Ridley, agreed two days earlier to give up the government's golden share, which capped foreign holdings at 15 per cent, five years before it was due to expire - a decision the House of Commons was still arguing about on 6 December 1989, by which time it had, in one Member's words, "enabled that company to join forces with Ford". A year later Ford's own fuel-economy compliance manager described the deal as having happened "in late 1989". There is no counterparty to name because there was none: Jaguar plc was a listed company after its 1984 privatisation and Ford bought it from a dispersed market of shareholders under a public takeover offer.
3. 2008 Ford sold Jaguar to Tata Motors, completing on 2 June 2008. One sale and purchase agreement, signed on 25 March 2008 and announced the next day, covered both Jaguar and Land Rover - brands, plants and intellectual property - for 2.3 billion dollars in cash, with Ford putting about 600 million dollars into the two marques' pension plans.