Three New Engines And Five New Cars In Five Years
Published: 6th November 2002
Every car is hand-built to a customer's own specification; every engine has the engine builder's initials on it. Nowhere else can you buy a car of such sophistication, which is all hand-made, to your own order, for a price even remotely comparable. In the case of the latest generation of cars, this philosophy has been implemented even further and everything, from body to chassis to engine and in this case even the switchgear and instrumentation, is designed and crafted in house. Indeed, TVR is irrationally proud of the fact that there are probably more employees per car produced here than there is anywhere else.
Yet despite all this talk of craftsmanship, it would have been impossible for TVR to have engineered such cars ten or fifteen years ago. The very latest high technology has been used, not in the styling but in the design engineering, to enable one of the largest British-owned car manufacturers to produce simple and elegant solutions to problems of how to hand-build such sophisticated cars in such small volumes. It is only at the stage that a design has to be compromised in order to mass-produce it where TVR parts company from high tech. If TVR ever had accountants in positions of authority, they would make sure that, just because of the cost of the switchgear, cars like the Tuscan and Tamora would never make it off the drawing board.
Fortunately, TVR Chairman Peter Wheeler is an engineer who,
in his own words, "just likes designing and building
things..."

