So this is it, then. The last TVR. This is the very car with which Nikolai Smolenski wanted to restart the company, and it’s back in Britain finished, V8-powered and on the road. A driveable tale of what might have been.
Russian businessman Smolenski, you’ll probably remember, bought TVR from its former owner, Peter Wheeler, in 2004, but despite his best intentions he could only watch as the whole shebang – already running out of both goodwill and customers – failed under him.
But even when the Blackpool site closed at the end of 2006, Smolenski hoped it might not be over. He took the name and development team with him, and a small team of engineers beavered away to come up with what sounds like a distinctly un-stupid idea for a limited-volume car maker: don’t use your own engine. Instead, why not buy a Chevrolet LS3 motor and save yourself the bother?
So here it is: a Tuscan Mk3, with a Chevy V8. Restarting production sounded like a plausible proposition until Smolenski’s team did the full numbers and realised that, in order to turn a profit, each car would have to sell for £100,000. No dice, then. The TVR name will live on only on wind turbines.
All except for the prototype Chevy-engined Tuscan, which was in Austria. Meanwhile, a TVR specialist – Str8six of Lewknor, Oxfordshire – was over here. Str8six has built a few ‘end of line’ TVRs, and it still owns a few Tuscan chassis it rescued from the factory. You can guess the rest.
Str8six has now rebuilt what was, in truth, a pretty shabby and hard-worked development hack. The car had been set up for high-speed autobahn work – not something for which a TVR’s famously pointy steering was a traditional match – while the engine bay was a state and the interior not much better.
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FastRenaultFan
They might not have been very well built but
make a success of TVR
AHA1
Much more viable
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