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Engineering, Converter, Assembler · Great West Road, Chiswick, London, United Kingdom · from September 1922 (as Hudson and Essex Motors of Great Britain Ltd)

Hudson Motors Ltd

The Chiswick firm to which Rover sent a batch of 33 standard 80-inch Land Rovers in 1950 to have Rolls-Royce B40 military engines fitted for Army trials — the conversion that lengthened the wheelbase to 81 inches. Hudson Motors Ltd of Great West Road was the British arm of the American Hudson Motor Car Company, though no source consulted states explicitly that the importer and the conversion contractor were the same business.

History

Hudson and Essex Motors of Great Britain Ltd was formed in September 1922 as the British representative of the Hudson and Essex motor companies of Detroit, importing vehicles in component form duty-free from Hudson's Canadian factory and assembling them here. It worked first at Acton Vale and in the spring of 1926 moved to purpose-built premises at 15 Great West Road, Chiswick — the first factory on what became known as Brentford's Golden Mile, with a chain assembly line said to be among the earliest in an English plant, a turntable at its end, and a self-contained three-storey service and body-repair building added in 1928. It employed over 250 people, built Hudsons, Essexes and later Terraplanes, and gave its name to 'Hudson's corner' by the Chiswick flyover. The business traded latterly as Hudson Essex Motors Ltd and then Hudson Motors Ltd; after the 1954 Nash-Kelvinator merger that created American Motors it became Rambler Motors Ltd, importing and servicing AMC cars into the 1970s.

The Land Rover episode belongs to 1950. The British Army was then pursuing standardisation on the Rolls-Royce B-series military engines and wanted the Land Rover assessed against what became the Austin Champ, which used the four-cylinder B40. Rover accordingly had a batch of 33 standard 80-inch vehicles delivered to Hudson Motors Ltd in Chiswick, where, under the supervision of Rover's own engineers, they were fitted with the Rolls-Royce 2.8-litre B40 Mk 2B and a four-speed gearbox. The taller, bulkier engine forced changes to the transfer box, front panel, floor, exhaust, cooling system and instruments, a raised bonnet with a hole cut for the radiator cap, and the rear axle moved back an inch — the change that gave the type its '81-inch' name. Around 33 to 34 were completed.

FVRDE trials in the early 1950s found the B40 no better than Rover's own 1,595 cc engine and the proposal was dropped; the Army's B40-powered light 4x4 went to the Austin Champ instead. Only two conversions are known to survive with the Rolls-Royce engine in place, one sold by Bonhams in 2014 and the other, ESU 229, preserved in the Dunsfold Collection.

All the Land Rover sources name Hudson Motors Ltd of Chiswick as the contractor, and Grace's Guide places Hudson Motors Ltd at Great West Road, Chiswick, in the same period; but none of the sources consulted actually connects the conversion work to the American importer's business, and the possibility that these were two different Chiswick firms of the same name has not been ruled out. The record is left at draft on that account.

Vehicles in this registry (1)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-10T05:17:07.279Z · status: draft