Lucas Industries

Lucas Industries plc was a British manufacturer of automotive accessories and important supplier of all British automobile manufacturer.

History

The company was founded by Joseph Lucas and his son Harry in 1872 under the name of Joseph Lucas & Son. Initially people traded with goods of metal and with lamps for ships and buses. 1902, the company in Joseph Lucas Ltd. was changed and the company specialized in the fields of magneto, distributor, windscreen wiper motors, starter motors and related accessories.

The manufacturer of switches and accumulators CAV and Rotax, a manufacturer of motorcycle accessories were taken over in 1926, the brake manufacturer Girling 1929. The direct competitors Simms ( with production of starter motors, spark plugs, ignition coils, etc.) took over Lucas in 1968. Increased in size Lucas reached for the British market a meaning analogous to Bosch for the German market.

1996 Lucas Industries merged with the American manufacturer Varity to LucasVarity, the brand name Lucas continues. 1999 LucasVarity was acquired by TRW Automotive.

Trivia

In the early years headlamps under the trademark King of the Road (English king of the road ) were marketed. After the Second World War, Lucas was sometimes disparagingly referred to as the Prince of Darkness (English Prince of Darkness ) or as Inventors of Darkness (English inventor of the darkness ) referred to, in reference to allegedly frequent failures of electrical components. It is unclear whether this criticism was justified, or whether the errors were to be found in poor production quality of the main collector British Leyland.