Hobson Industries

Hobson Industries is a private company established in 1987 by Peter Hobson after service as a Charge Chief Weapons Engineering Artificer in the Royal Navy. The company it trades through was incorporated on 31 July 1985 as Peter Hobson (Louth) Limited and renamed Hobson Industries Limited on 15 July 1997; it is registered at Station Road, Donington on Bain, in the Lincolnshire Wolds near Louth, under codes for vehicle sales, repair and parts wholesaling.

The firm specialises in what it calls the through-life support, management and development of Land Rover heritage military and civilian platforms, 'in effect, the Land Rover need never die'. It offers four core services: vehicle builds to original specification or with modifications, plus refurbishment, reconditioning and homologation across all Land Rover models, from a standard 90 to an armoured gunship and including Series vehicles and Range Rovers; new and reconditioned powertrain and transmission units built to Land Rover tolerances; parts supply from a stock of more than 16,000 lines, using an asset-management programme the company pioneered to recycle and recondition parts no longer available, together with its own Hobson Originals range re-introduced to manage obsolescence; and armour design and fabrication in steel, composite and ceramic with blast protection. It works to ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015.

Its best-documented Ministry of Defence contract was the Land Rover Wolf swing-away spare wheel carrier conversion, more than 7,000 sets supplied from about 2015 for fitting by REME vehicle mechanics at unit level, each kit comprising a Mantec wheel carrier, side-swing tailgate hinges, revised rear-light wiring, blanking plates, a rear access step and fittings; a demonstration vehicle was shown at DVD 2016. The conversion was later found to prevent standard military trailers from being towed, and by July 2017 the MoD had declared some 6,000 unconverted kits surplus and sold them at about a fifth of cost.

The company remains in family hands. Peter Henry Hobson is recorded as a person with significant control, Richard Charles Hobson was appointed a director on 1 August 2025 and notified as a person with significant control in September 2026, and the company filed full accounts to 31 March 2025. For a week in spring 2025 it was briefly renamed Parabellum Projects Limited before reverting to Hobson Industries Limited on 6 May 2025.