Recently it has been released that the car company TVR will be brought up from the dead, and most importantly back in British hands. Its official as the current TVR website displays the below welcome page.
The Blackpool car company, TVR was sold by Peter Wheeler to the Russian billionaire Nikolai Smolensky in 2004. Only after 2 years of the acquisition in 2006 with the TVR Sagaris currently being sold, the company had been put on ice. Since then a group of investors led by Les Edgar managed to make an offer to buy the rights of TVR for the brand's return. Edgar is part of a three-man executive board that will pilot the TVR brand back into the marketplace by 2015.
The new models will stick to TVR tradition by retaining a front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout, cars that are as mechanically simple and free of electronic wizardy, keeping them in character with the tradition of all TVR cars. That means cars that Edgar likes to call "supercars for the common man," with pricing that ranges from £50k to £80k. Edgar says the question of whether TVR will continue its tradition of developing and building its own engines is undecided, but doesn't think sourcing an engine from another manufacturer would compromise the cars' character. As for what the new models might be called, the new owner says he and his team may use existing names from the TVR fold, but they would still like to build all-new cars rather than merely update the old ones.
When Edgar and his team bought TVR, they received the company's name, design rights and assets, the latter of which includes Blackpool Engineering, a company set up by Smolensky that, among other things, contains a store of jigs, molds and spare parts for existing models. Edgar hopes to sell those parts and the company's service expertise to owners of existing TVR models. Once the business of selling cars, parts and service is up and running, he says breaking even could be a minimum of three years away, and if that all goes well, a return to Le Mans racing could be possible, as well.
We wonder what will be in store for us in 2015....
