With all the opprobrium getting deposited onto Elon Musk’s doorstep, it’s easy to forget that he’s hardly the first car-maker with objectionable views. Looking for shared values or any sort of moral clarity from an auto tycoon is and has always been a fruitless endeavor. From the reckless and rapacious founding days of the automobile business, with its colorful grifters and copious con artists, to many legacy car-makers’ relationships with the Third Reich and the industry’s almost universal opposition to safety and emissions regulation, disreputableness is a common thread. We could get into wholesale offshoring and the contemporary de-unionization movement and the tens of millions of dollars in political donations lavished upon Donald Trump and numerous election-denying congresspeople, but we won’t.
Which is to say that when we tell you the story of the Ineos Grenadier and Ineos’s founder and controlling shareholder, Jim Ratcliffe, you’d do well to remember that a car-maker’s priority is almost always selling cars as profitably as possible.
