Tom Farmer

Farmer opened the first Kwik-Fit in Edinburgh in 1971 on a simple promise: drive in without an appointment and have exhausts, tyres and brakes sorted while you wait, at a fixed price. Standardising the most common car repairs into a fast, branded service turned a messy local trade into a national chain, and Ford bought it for around a billion pounds in 1999. He died in 2025, and the drive-in fast-fit format he popularised is still how many British drivers get the basics fixed.