Of course there is a difference between the perceived nationality of a brand and who owns it.
JLR might be Indian owned, since being brought from an American company. And Ford brought Land Rover off a German car company. But it is headquartered in the UK. JLR owns the rights to Daimler, Lanchester and Rover. Daimler is a point in case. Daimler; wasn’t it a German company? Daimler-Benz is very German. Daimler brought the rights to use the name over a 100 years ago. Not sure any Germans get their names bent out of shape about the idea of a German name being applied to a Jaguar-based vehicle that is used by British officialdom (Daimler Limo).
Tetleys and PG Tips are perceived as British brands, Indian owned. But the actual product, tea leaves, was never made in Britain.
Moving from the fossil brands, there has been some coverage of new “British” brands. One example is “Arrival”, a new company making electric vans, and soon cars. They have won a very decent order to supply UPS with slick new vans, and will be supplying Uber with cars from 2024-5. But their schtick is not the design of the cars (its clear, that electric cars will be more commoditized than dinojuice cars, given the incredible sharing of parts going on. Essentially, its going to become that all electric cars will perform more or less the same in their particular class, the differentials will go back to how the car will look, whereas petrol cars were heading down a route where they all looked the same), but how those cars are built. They have developed the idea of microfactories, and claim that they can take existing empty warehouses and convert those, in a matter of months, to a mostly automated low volume car plant serving local needs, producing vehicles based on what people want. So I can see different mixes of commercial versus personal vehicles, according to local car ownership and so forth.
Its a British company, American CEO, an Italian heading up the crucial robotics element. Main invetor is Hyundai. Is this what Hyundai is envisaging; instead of a business with incredibly large factories in Korea sending out huge car carriers, which get stuck in the Suez canal, to distant countries, while guessing exactly what spec people will buy, will move to a series of tiny factories, built local.
Tesla broke the mould of car making, but they still make cars in the same way as Henry Ford. Big brown field site, probably involving favours to local authorities, employing thousands of people. They built a huge plant in Berlin. Can’t recruit enough people apparently.