Wednesday, February 13, 2013
TVR Jigs Moulds lost
Possibly quite saddening news for any TVR fans (myself included).
Any hope of creating new versions of any of the most recent TVR models has likely gone. News has emerged that the Jigs and Body Moulds for the newer cars such as the Sagaris and T350 have most likely been scrapped.
When production of TVRs ended these items, essential for production were shipped to Dresden in Germany after Nioklay Smolensky (current, much hated, owner of TVR) bought TVR back in 2004. Sadly it sounds like the all important Jigs and Moulds have gone the same way as TVR itself has.
They were offered to TVR specialist Powers Performance (formerly known as TVR Power) but the cost of bringing them back to the UK was too high for owner Dominic Trickett. Trickett reported to PistonHeads "Now he says he's sold them to a businessman in Dresden, which tells me he's scrapped them".
Trickett, formerly a development engineer at TVR, is doubtful anyone based in the UK would be willing to bring them all back if they did still exist. "No-one in the UK is going to hire 40 lorries, only to find the body moulds have all been distorted"
Powers Performance has kept in contact with Smolensky and were involved in The Russian's plan of installing Corvette engines into existing TVR bodies and chassis.
However that plan also failed. "We put the LS and the Borg Warner 6-speed in it," Trickett said. "We were trying to homologate for Europe and the US, but we realised there wasn't a cost-effective market for the car."
Smolensky officially declared TVR dead earlier this year and stated that he was going to use the name for wind farms, quite a low blow for TVR enthusiasts, however, so far, nothing has come of that.
Trickett told PistonHeads, "You can;t build a mark III Tuscan and call it a Vulcan, it's not a new model. To bring back TVR you need £50 million to build a new car."
He also said that UK specialists are now sophisticated enough that if you gave them enough money they would be able to build an entire TVR from scratch. "There's more facility now to buy parts and have them made than there ever was when TVR was in business."
TVR was and still is a great loss, at the moment is it unlikely the company could come back due to the climate of the economy. There price segment they used to control is now full of cars from big manufacturers such as Porsche, Nissan, etc...
Hopefully one day TVR will be back, but it won't be for a long time.
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