RE: TVR: Back in business (there's even a website)

[GTRene]

I was thinking, that maybe they could use the chassis/engine/etc, from the C6 or Z06 which is a nice alu chassis (rust free and rigid), then the LS3 or LS7 and drive-train already fits/sits in etc,
then give it some TVR tweaks (engine) and TVR style (I prefer classic style) interior and a nice TVR style Body etc...

could be great and I'm not a fan of Corvettes but some parts are really good, also that way you save a lot developments etc.

[TA14]

DonkeyApple said:

With the UK being bust and those with money to spend not wanting cars like TVRs it is hard to see any form of business model for retail sales at all.

You're posting a lot of negative stuff these days. It's only because of a lack of management, foresight and faith that TVR went bust five years ago.

[DonkeyApple]

TA14 said:

DonkeyApple said:

With the UK being bust and those with money to spend not wanting cars like TVRs it is hard to see any form of business model for retail sales at all.

You're posting a lot of negative stuff these days. It's only because of a lack of management, foresight and faith that TVR went bust five years ago.

Only because people don't seem to understand the basics of supply, demand, economics etc.

The world moved on rapidly from the mid 90s in terms of what was expected of sports cars and PW never re-nvested revenues to keep up so he ended up with a hugely inefficient company unable to deliver a product that the market came to demand in significant numbers. That's really what killed TVR. The S6 issues obviously sped this decline in sales up but the trend began before that engine ever appeared but rather as competition appeared in the mid/late 90s.

TVR went bust before the credit crunch, in the zenith of the largest economic boom for nearly 100 years. This tells us an awful lot about the product and the fact that even when money was freely available that money opted to go to other brands, brands which had either more kudos or more luxuries. The UK market never really wanted a 'real' sportscar, people wanted something that was perceied as a sports car but worked and ran like a mass produced, every day car.

And then we reach the post 2007 credit crunch era. If sales were dying off 4 or 5 years before then the recession would have simply ended them overnight.

It's not that I am negative but it's just that people don't seem willing to understand that no group in any form of commercial size wants this type of product any more, not in the UK, not Europe, not America or the Far East. You can see very clearly what the market demands and it bears not a single resemblance to anything TVR has ever been, or should be.

Look at the G40 from Ginetta, people on PH are always saying that it is too expensive, same with Caterhams and others. But these people have no concept of what it actually costs to emplo 20 odd people, run a facility, meet regulatory requirements and then sell enough units with sufficient margin to cover these costs let alone make a profit.

Making sports cars for customers who haven't the money to buy them is simply not a prudent model

So, you either go low volume but as a result higher price, or mass produce for low costs but then to get the sales numbers you need to strip out absolutely everything that was ever TVR.

There will come a time in the economic cycle when a model may work and if this co-incides with a change in social culture back to demanding such products then this will be a great moment in time, but that moment isn't now or anywhere near the near future. Sadly.

That's why I feel that the only possible model that could work in the current climate would be a race series and a long term view to return to road cars when the market is right. It's not like we are seeing many new Lotus, Ginettas, Zolfes or anything much on the roads at this moment in time.

[JonRB]

GTRene said:

I was thinking, that maybe they could use the chassis/engine/etc, from the C6 or Z06 which is a nice alu chassis (rust free and rigid), then the LS3 or LS7 and drive-train already fits/sits in etc,
then give it some TVR tweaks (engine) and TVR style (I prefer classic style) interior and a nice TVR style Body etc...

could be great and I'm not a fan of Corvettes but some parts are really good, also that way you save a lot developments etc.

That would be a re-bodied Corvette though, wouldn't it?

[TA14]

DonkeyApple said:

Only because people don't seem to understand the basics of supply, demand, economics etc.

The world moved on rapidly from the mid 90s in terms of what was expected of sports cars and PW never re-nvested revenues to keep up so he ended up with a hugely inefficient company unable to deliver a product that the market came to demand in significant numbers. That's really what killed TVR. The S6 issues obviously sped this decline in sales up but the trend began before that engine ever appeared but rather as competition appeared in the mid/late 90s.

You must be able to type a lot faster than me.

I think that that is unfair on PRW. From the 90s he designed every model and engine that TVR used thereafter. He tried to sell the company for 10 years and it is a tragedy that no-one suitable ever came forward. As many know and many have their head in the sand the S6 engine killed off TVR; although most of the fundamental problems are still there with the S6 engine (ignoring the FFF route) they had been overcome in-house at TVR and their lack of offering a warranty put off too many buyers.

[TA14]

DonkeyApple said:

TVR went bust before the credit crunch, in the zenith of the largest economic boom for nearly 100 years. This tells us an awful lot about the product and the fact that even when money was freely available that money opted to go to other brands, brands which had either more kudos or more luxuries.

I strongly disagree there. I think it tells us a lot more about the management than the product. A company which traditionally produced 500 to 600 cars a year produced double that for a very, very short time but never reduced the work force. Aston Martin by comparison went from 5,000 pa to 150 to 7,000.

DonkeyApple said:

The UK market never really wanted a 'real' sportscar, people wanted something that was perceived as a sports car but worked and ran like a mass produced, every day car.

This has always been a big problem. Most people would rather buy a luxuriously specced Chim 400 than a stripped out 500 for the same money. Nevertheless TVR survived just for over half a century.

[rev-erend]

DonkeyApple said:

TA14 said:

DonkeyApple said:

With the UK being bust and those with money to spend not wanting cars like TVRs it is hard to see any form of business model for retail sales at all.

You're posting a lot of negative stuff these days. It's only because of a lack of management, foresight and faith that TVR went bust five years ago.

Only because people don't seem to understand the basics of supply, demand, economics etc.

The world moved on rapidly from the mid 90s in terms of what was expected of sports cars and PW never re-nvested revenues to keep up so he ended up with a hugely inefficient company unable to deliver a product that the market came to demand in significant numbers. That's really what killed TVR. The S6 issues obviously sped this decline in sales up but the trend began before that engine ever appeared but rather as competition appeared in the mid/late 90s.

TVR went bust before the credit crunch, in the zenith of the largest economic boom for nearly 100 years. This tells us an awful lot about the product and the fact that even when money was freely available that money opted to go to other brands, brands which had either more kudos or more luxuries. The UK market never really wanted a 'real' sportscar, people wanted something that was perceied as a sports car but worked and ran like a mass produced, every day car.

And then we reach the post 2007 credit crunch era. If sales were dying off 4 or 5 years before then the recession would have simply ended them overnight.

It's not that I am negative but it's just that people don't seem willing to understand that no group in any form of commercial size wants this type of product any more, not in the UK, not Europe, not America or the Far East. You can see very clearly what the market demands and it bears not a single resemblance to anything TVR has ever been, or should be.

Look at the G40 from Ginetta, people on PH are always saying that it is too expensive, same with Caterhams and others. But these people have no concept of what it actually costs to emplo 20 odd people, run a facility, meet regulatory requirements and then sell enough units with sufficient margin to cover these costs let alone make a profit.

Making sports cars for customers who haven't the money to buy them is simply not a prudent model

So, you either go low volume but as a result higher price, or mass produce for low costs but then to get the sales numbers you need to strip out absolutely everything that was ever TVR.

There will come a time in the economic cycle when a model may work and if this co-incides with a change in social culture back to demanding such products then this will be a great moment in time, but that moment isn't now or anywhere near the near future. Sadly.

That's why I feel that the only possible model that could work in the current climate would be a race series and a long term view to return to road cars when the market is right. It's not like we are seeing many new Lotus, Ginettas, Zolfes or anything much on the roads at this moment in time.

Well said ...

Another multi millionaire needed .. willing to invest a big fortune and make peanuts in profit.

[TA14]

DonkeyApple said:

Look at the G40 from Ginetta, people on PH are always saying that it is too expensive, same with Caterhams and others. But these people have no concept of what it actually costs to emplo 20 odd people, run a facility, meet regulatory requirements and then sell enough units with sufficient margin to cover these costs let alone make a profit.

I still think that there is a gap somewhere between Caterham and the upper Morgans at say £60,000 which is pretty much where TVR were.

[JonRB]

TA14 said:

As many know and many have their head in the sand the S6 engine killed off TVR; although most of the fundamental problems are still there with the S6 engine (ignoring the FFF route) they had been overcome in-house at TVR and their lack of offering a warranty put off too many buyers.

It fundamentally contributed, yes. And not just the lack of warranty but the way the Factory treated customers who did have failures. It certainly contributed to a lack of goodwill amongst existing customers, dealers, and also a lack of confidence for prospective buyers.

However, as DonkeyApple has said, I think the writing was on the wall anyway. The niche that TVR inhabited was being rapidly eroded on all sides, not least from mainstream manufacturers diversifying. The Golden Years were golden because TVR had pretty much no competition in the poke/£ niche they occupied. By the time Wheeler sold, their niche was pretty much gone.

TA14 said:

I still think that there is a gap somewhere between Caterham and the upper Morgans at say £60,000 which is pretty much where TVR were.

There's a hell of a lot of choice in that price bracket now. As I said, the niche has gone. Someone wanting decent performance for that kind of money has so much to choose from. How about a Z4M? Or the 370Z? Or a Porsche Boxster S? Any would scratch the itch that traditionally only TVR could provide.

Edited by JonRB on Thursday 22 November 13:48

[900T-R]

If you could persuade GM to make a 1:1.2 scale model of a Corvette chassis, it might work.

Seriously, DonkeyApple has it right and his proposed business model aligns with what I've been saying on here for a rather prolonged period.

The 'golden' period of the ealry 90s saw TVR in the mainstream for a combination of reasons, none of which are present in the current marketplace or for that matter in the forseeable future. All niche sports car manufacturers that are still alive now (bar Morgan ), are mainly thriving on their motorsport and events business and/or have successfully pushed their products upmarket towards an audience that can/will afford them as a trinket. As Joop Donkervoort of the epynomous car company has said recently, the market for niche cars under 100,000 euro (plus local taxes) is dead (which is why they have been developing the 'extreme' GT/GTO variants, that can successfully double as GT3 racers).

There may well be a growing backlash against the homogenisation and growing detachment of the driver from the action in modern, Euro-compliant performance cars - but a significant part of this will be the geek/car bore market who will dissect the minutiae of suspension geometry all night on forums and don't care that their car looks like something cobbled together from leftover racing car parts on a bit of scaffolding and humdrum Ford engines (to whom TVR as a brand holds little or no appeal) and arguably, the rest of that market may be well served by the legacy of TVRs PW days for some time to come - still as many cars left as punters at least, and quite a few of them better developed than when they left Bristol Avenue...

[DonkeyApple]

TA14 said:

DonkeyApple said:

TVR went bust before the credit crunch, in the zenith of the largest economic boom for nearly 100 years. This tells us an awful lot about the product and the fact that even when money was freely available that money opted to go to other brands, brands which had either more kudos or more luxuries.

I strongly disagree there. I think it tells us a lot more about the management than the product. A company which traditionally produced 500 to 600 cars a year produced double that for a very, very short time but never reduced the work force. Aston Martin by comparison went from 5,000 pa to 150 to 7,000.

DonkeyApple said:

The UK market never really wanted a 'real' sportscar, people wanted something that was perceived as a sports car but worked and ran like a mass produced, every day car.

This has always been a big problem. Most people would rather buy a luxuriously specced Chim 400 than a stripped out 500 for the same money. Nevertheless TVR survived just for over half a century.

Back to just pre NS, TVR were hardly building any cars, haemoraging cash on rebuilds of S6 and massively over staffed, hugely inefficient and with bills outstanding all over the place. If you look at the accounts it was kapput, in a position which could not be reversed without huge investment of funds to re-tool, pay redundancies and make the manufacturing process faster, better, efficient.

Post NS, he soon found that he also did not have the funds to re-tool or cover the redundancies required, hence the fold/pheonix to try and solve the latter.

When you look at how many man hours it took to make a shell useable and to shape and fit bespoke doors this is one example of how using 21stC tech would have speeded up that aspect 10 fold and reduced labour demand. PW opted to take money out rather than re-invest and that was his right.

With reagrd to TVR surviving for 50 years, technically it didn't , it had a habbit of going bust at each economic cycle change and being reborn with new owners, funding etc.

[DonkeyApple]

TA14 said:

DonkeyApple said:

Only because people don't seem to understand the basics of supply, demand, economics etc.

The world moved on rapidly from the mid 90s in terms of what was expected of sports cars and PW never re-nvested revenues to keep up so he ended up with a hugely inefficient company unable to deliver a product that the market came to demand in significant numbers. That's really what killed TVR. The S6 issues obviously sped this decline in sales up but the trend began before that engine ever appeared but rather as competition appeared in the mid/late 90s.

You must be able to type a lot faster than me.

I think that that is unfair on PRW. From the 90s he designed every model and engine that TVR used thereafter. He tried to sell the company for 10 years and it is a tragedy that no-one suitable ever came forward. As many know and many have their head in the sand the S6 engine killed off TVR; although most of the fundamental problems are still there with the S6 engine (ignoring the FFF route) they had been overcome in-house at TVR and their lack of offering a warranty put off too many buyers.

There is absolutely no hiding from the fact that the S6 mess sped up the decline rapidly, but you can trace the decline of TVR back to the mid 90s when cars like the MG, Boxster, SLK all appeared and TVR owners flocked to them. All along a far too significant % of TVR owners had wanted these mass produced, everyday cars from the outset but they didn't exist when the appearance of the Griff and then the Chim came along and was a moment in time also combined with the UK population demographic of the baby boomers being not just the largest group but the wealthiest.

We won't see such a convergence for generations, there is no large and wealthy demographic following on the heals of the boomers. It was a moment in time.

TVR failed, or refused, to move with the requirements of their most important customer base and at the same time by 2000 we also had the tech crash and the falling of contracting rates in IT which also decimated customer demand from that sector. The S6 foray just completed this slow. steady decline in a rather abrupt manner. But the S6 issue just highlighted how damaged the company already was that they couldn't actually fix the problem properly or quickly enough to halt the damage. If the company had been better funded and more efficient then the issue of super cheap bad components and corner cutting on the design may never have occured and if it still had they would have been able to fix it quicker.

You mention the gap between Ginetta and Morgan and I think you are 100% spot on, I suspect that you are seeing Sag figures in that region because it is (along with other Tivs) still the only type of car that fills that void, but is there a business for new cars there? I can't see it in the current climate. The millions to set up would never be recouped from enough sales with enough margin.

Maybe a few years down the road?

I bloody hope so.

[900T-R]

What's a luxuriously specced Chim 400 anyway? Does it have gold plated controls?

Anyway, 'our' serious magazines here always maintained that a 400 with PAS would be a better/nicer driver's car than a 500 without... and I can see where they came from although I marginally prefer non-PAS cars myself.

[vixen1700]

http://www.cwrcars.com/showroom/index.php/gallery

How about CWR's interpretation of TVR, 6 cars planned for next year at £69k each?

Is that promising, starting at just 6 cars, will the demand be there?

Looks nice in those NEC pictures.

[unrepentant]

vixen1700 said:

http://www.cwrcars.com/showroom/index.php/gallery

How about CWR's interpretation of TVR, 6 cars planned for next year at £69k each?

Is that promising, starting at just 6 cars, will the demand be there?

Looks nice in those NEC pictures.

69k for something that looks like a car that was old fashioned 30 years ago? Seriously?

TVR is gone and it aint coming back people.

Somebody mentioned the Far East market as a market for some kind of TVR. Chinese kids buy a lot of nice cars and they are a great market right now. They don't want TVR's. The want Range Rovers, Cayenne's, GT-R's etc.. They want luxury, high image, high quality products.

[Zod]

vixen1700 said:

http://www.cwrcars.com/showroom/index.php/gallery

How about CWR's interpretation of TVR, 6 cars planned for next year at £69k each?

Is that promising, starting at just 6 cars, will the demand be there?

Looks nice in those NEC pictures.

Is that a joke?

[JonRB]

DonkeyApple said:

There is absolutely no hiding from the fact that the S6 mess sped up the decline rapidly, but you can trace the decline of TVR back to the mid 90s when cars like the MG, Boxster, SLK all appeared and TVR owners flocked to them. All along a far too significant % of TVR owners had wanted these mass produced, everyday cars from the outset but they didn't exist when the appearance of the Griff and then the Chim came along and was a moment in time

Indeed. That's exactly what I was trying to say in my post.

[JonRB]

Zod said:

Is that a joke?

unrepentant said:

69k for something that looks like a car that was old fashioned 30 years ago? Seriously?

I think it looks stunning actually. Very much in the same mould as the Eagle E-Type and the Jensen Interceptor R.

Edited by JonRB on Thursday 22 November 15:56

[GTRene]

vixen1700 said:

http://www.cwrcars.com/showroom/index.php/gallery

How about CWR's interpretation of TVR, 6 cars planned for next year at £69k each?

Is that promising, starting at just 6 cars, will the demand be there?

Looks nice in those NEC pictures.

I do like such cars with a classic shape and not full with gimmicks like today's hitech?? cars.
and putting not to much cars in the market and stay small (not to much cars a year) can work.

So I hope CWR does succeed, I like those cars.

[TA14]

DonkeyApple said:

Back to just pre NS, TVR were hardly building any cars, haemoraging cash on rebuilds of S6 and massively over staffed, hugely inefficient and with bills outstanding all over the place. If you look at the accounts it was kapput, in a position which could not be reversed without huge investment of funds to re-tool, pay redundancies and make the manufacturing process faster, better, efficient.

IIRC the number was in 100s pa; more or less the historical average; the rebuilds of the S6 were never done in a manner for a long future for TVR, the staffing was a problem but the on-going loss of sales due to other factors made matters a lot worse and yes there were bills but you would have been an idiot not to know this before you bought the company since there were just too many suppliers with similar stories.

I am intrigued by your re-tool comment since I cannot see how it applies or could do to TVR.