Jaguar Land Rover Halewood is a Jaguar Land Rover factory plant in Halewood, Merseyside, England, and forms the major part of the factory complex in Halewood which is shared with Ford of Britain who manufacture transmissions at the site, and who opened the site in 1962 as their Halewood Body & Assembly plant. History 1963–2001 The Halewood plant was originally opened by Ford on 2 October 1963, to build the then small-saloon Ford Anglia. Reflecting pressure on Ford of Britain's principal plant at Dagenham, the Halewood plant was also used for assembling the Ford Corsair between the model's 1964 launch and 1969. More recently the plant has been associated with the Ford Escort - which replaced the Anglia in 1967. The Capri was also assembled at Halewood from its introduction in 1969. The introduction of the Fiesta in 1976 saw Ford of Europe restructure its entire European operations: all Capri production was moved to the Cologne plant in Germany, whilst Halewood was developed to become (until 1998 along with Saarlouis) Ford's main European production facility for the Escort and derivative Ford Orion models. The Escort was phased out by Ford in 2000, but the van version of the Escort remained in production at Halewood on a small scale until 2002 when it was replaced by the Turkish built Transit Connect. Since 2001 In 1997, Ford announced plans to replace the Escort with the more radically styled Ford Focus. Furthermore, Ford of Europe announced European production of the Focus would only be carried out at Saarlouis, Germany and Valencia, Spain fuelling rumours that Halewood was due to be closed by Ford. However, Jaguar Cars, owned at the time by Ford, was developing a new mid-sized saloon model which was loosely based on the Ford Mondeo. Ford decided that production of this model, the Jaguar X-Type, would commence at Halewood from 2001 onwards. In 2007, Halewood commenced production of the second generation Land Rover Freelander model, Freelander 2, and a dirt track test facility was constructed at Halewood specifically for Freelander 2 and subsequent Land Rover models. In March 2008, Ford finalised a deal to sell Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors, part of the Indian-based Tata Group, one of the world's largest manufacturers of commercial vehicles. Under the terms of the deal, Ford retained partial ownership of Halewood's transmission plant which it originally operated in collaboration with Getrag, but in