A British car and van brand with roots dating to 1857, owned by Stellantis and building electric vans at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire.
Vauxhall Motors is one of Britain's best-known car and van brands. Its current cars include the Astra, Corsa, Frontera, Mokka and Grandland, and its vans include the Combo, Movano and Vivaro. Vauxhall is now part of Stellantis, and its one remaining British factory is at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, where it builds electric vans.
The company started in 1857, when Scottish marine engineer Alexander Wilson founded Alex Wilson and Company in Vauxhall, London, building pumps and marine engines. It built its first car in 1903 and took the Vauxhall Motors name in 1907. Production moved to Luton in 1905, where cars and vans were built until the Luton van plant closed on 28 March 2025. We did not find a mission statement for the UK business.
Ellesmere Port opened in 1962 on a site that had been a training aerodrome in the First World War and closed in 1957 before Vauxhall bought it. In 2012 it had a theoretical capacity of about 187,000 vehicles a year. The first Vauxhall Viva was built there in 1964, and in 1996 it became the first car plant in the world certified for its environmental management systems. Astra production ended there in April 2022, and electric van production began in 2023, including the Vauxhall Combo-e, Citroen e-Berlingo, Peugeot e-Partner and Fiat E-Doblo. Wikipedia lists the registered office as Pinley House in Coventry.
Vauxhall has changed owners several times: General Motors from 1925 to 2017, PSA Group from 2017 to 2021, and Stellantis since January 2021. The Ellesmere Port workforce has fallen from a peak of 12,000 in 1975 to about 1,100 by 2019. Andrew Betts Brown bought the firm in 1863 and renamed it Vauxhall Iron Works. The Luton headquarters at Griffin House moved to Chalton House in 2019. Ellesmere Port began as a sub-assembly and engine plant supplying Luton and Dunstable and started exporting Opel-badged cars in 1980. Culture and values for the current UK team were not published on the pages we read, so we cannot describe them.
In 2002 the Corsa was Britain's second most popular new car and the Astra third, which shows how familiar the brand has been on UK roads. Roles in a business like this include production, engineering, supply chain, sales, marketing, dealer support and customer service. For up-to-date information on Vauxhall's UK operations, check the Vauxhall website and Stellantis UK pages.
Website: www.vauxhall.co.uk
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