If you want to know whether a startup car company will succeed, the best place to look is the vehicles it plans to sell in the future. Yes, exotic supercar brands can get by with one magnificent machine and some variations, but proper car companies need portfolios. That's why it's discouraging, at least for now, that INEOS, which made its name on a reboot of the old-school Land Rover Defender
, has delayed the rollout of its Fusilier SUV.We reported on the Fusilier when INEOS announced it in early
2024, back when the automotive world was a far different, largely tariff-free realm. At that time, billionaire owner Jim Ratcliffe – who launched the brand after Jaguar Land Rover debuted a new Defender and refused to sell him the rights to continue making the revered yet rather crude older model – said that the Fusilier lineup would include an EV and a range-extending hybrid option. A mid-2027 arrival has been recalibrated for 2028, however, according to Automotive News.
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Speed Bumps For A Success Story
You could tell by Ratcliffe's comments in 2024 that he wasn't terribly psyched about having to go electric after the successful introduction of the Grenadier in 2022. "We have to have this offering, whether we like it or not," he said at the time. Most other carmakers were either leaning into EVs back then, or else lamenting that they didn't have an EV program. INEOS, by contrast, really didn't need EVs because it was simply trying to sell a throwback SUV to customers who still prized the thoroughly last-century virtues of internal-combustion. This was a business model built on petrol. INEOS's next vehicle continued that vibe: the Quartermaster is a pickup truck aimed squarely at the U.S. market.
INEOS has adjusted the Fusilier's plan. Now the company says that the gas-hybrid extended-range version will precede the EV. Given the way the EV market is going in the U.S., the EV wait could be extended. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if the electrified Fusilier goes away completely; with EV incentives and emissions penalties being deregulated out of existence, the need to sell anything other than gas-powered vehicles in the U.S. is declining. For INEOS, this is actually pretty good news because the company is otherwise dealing with a tariff situation that it didn't have when it was growing the Grenadier business. (Quartermaster was going to face the old chicken tax tariff, but even with that impediment, INEOS figured it was the right product for the U.S. if the brand wanted to grow.)
Move Fast On Fusilier
The chaos that has gripped the auto industry in the wake of Trump's tariffs and the passage of the Big, Beautiful Bill does present INEOS with a unique opportunity. Thus far, the company has proven that customers want what it's selling. Growth in the U.S. has been strong, and INEOS wants to increase it by 50 percent, as has been widely reported. The EV market has become considerably more challenging in 2025, but competition has also picked up. Ratcliffe's grumbling about marketing vehicles that are required but not demanded might have been prescient. INEOS could be one of the few (maybe the only) automotive startup that genuinely benefits from policy shifts in the U.S.
The recommended course of action would be to move fast on Fusilier, ditching the tricky powertrain configuration and mimicking the setup for Grenadier and Quartermaster, both of which source their engines from BMW. There are still plenty of gas stations in the U.S.! Off-roaders are also a conservative lot, hence the early support for Grenadier as a Defender redux.
INEOS could also lean into this narrative, advertising their practical commitment to combustion while competitors struggle to figure out electrification, including ways in which they can convince buyers to choose hybrids. The back–the-future approach has worked quite well for INEOS thus far. For most carmakers, major changes to the auto industry, brought on by tariffs and deregulation, have thrown a wrench into the works. But for INEOS, that wrench could be a gift.
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