RE: TVR's return - new details

[otolith]

This debate makes me think of a Stella Artois aficionado not understanding how a microbrewery could possibly compete when they could not make nitrokeg lager as cheaply, consistently and in the same volumes as his favoured brand.

[London424]

TA14 said:

Ozzie Osmond said:

Hopefully "new TVR" will be a great success. The question remains who is going to buy the cars and how much cash they will have to put on the table to get one.

You Porsche guys can never imagine that anyone would think differently to you. 1,000 cars per annum would be about 1/200 of Porsche's sales. I can imagine that 1/200 of those people might choose the TVR. Of course that's just Porsche so the actual percentage would be much lower.

This goes back to my question earlier in the thread. Does anyone know what objectives new TVR has? How many do they want/need to sell to be viable?

[DonkeyApple]

Ozzie Osmond said:

DonkeyApple said:

Morgan sell over 1000 cars a year.

Morgan's customer base is ageing almost as rapidly as their designs. Even the cross-eyed Aero 8 seems only to be bought by the same group of customers - simply the old folks with a bit more cash moving up from their Plus 8. Morgan and Caterham only get away with it because the cars have been around more or less unchanged for 50 years, enabling them to avoid almost all R&D expenditure. I don't think there's any sign the market wants a shiny new product from this type of manufacturer, as Caterham 21, Morgan Aero and Ginetta G60 have found out.

I think the Noble 600 is more similar in conception to what TVR are trying to achieve with their new car. Which in the case of Noble has meant vastly expensive and hardly any sales.

Hopefully "new TVR" will be a great success. The question remains who is going to buy the cars and how much cash they will have to put on the table to get one. Since TVRs heyday in the 1990s the world has moved on and is now dominated by excellent sportscars which have the massive cost-efficiency of mass production. The ongoing struggle at Lotus shows just how tough the business can be.

It's always easy to find an excuse NOT to buy a sportscar, as the AC 378 has demonstrated.

All people age Ozzie. Morgan attracts the older chap but they attract new older chaps every year.

But the observation is that they attract 1000 over 50s a year to buy cars. Why? Because not everyone wants one of the very many, ubiquitous, mass produced sportscars.

It will possibly surprise many people but not everyone buys off the peg shirts and suits that have been compromised to fit as many average people as possible. Often the mass produced, one size fits all product is made better ( despite what many think) but that isn't the point. Sometimes it is about ensuring you get what you want, not what a million other people are generally happy to settle for.

This new TVR won't be as well made as the mass produced generic sports cars.

With a manual gear box it will be much slower than the mass produced auto box sportscars.

With no mid mounted engine or million GBP development program it won't handle as well as many of the mass produced sportscars.

It simply won't ever measure up against any of the mass produced, multi billion GBP cars that dominate the market.

And that is probably exactly why it'll find buyers. Just like Morgan does and some others.

My peers and I simply don't obtain any pleasure from these modern cars which offer no challenge and few thrills, are swamped with a plethora of childish little switches, beepers and lights that what manufactured by the thousands in anodyne and soulless environments. The logical answer lies in classic cars but values of these have become silly and actually driving them is frowned upon.

I don't think anyone believes this is going to be an easy task and I certainly don't think there is any profit in <£70k cars of this nature but I catagorically don't subscribe to a belief that they cannot succeed because everyone really wants a car that is identical to thousands of others, designed by an accounts department, built by automotrons and stuffed full of stty little buttons that just aren't needed but appeal to the childlike nature of seemingly many grown people.

[900T-R]

otolith said:

This debate makes me think of a Stella Artois aficionado not understanding how a microbrewery could possibly compete when they could not make nitrokeg lager as cheaply, consistently and in the same volumes as his favoured brand.

Very succinctly put and pretty much what I was trying to express all along.

[skyrover]

dinkel said:

skyrover said:

On the contrary... there are too many sanitised, boring options available.

The market is crying out for something a bit mental.

You can't do mass market appeal better than the big brands, so go for something different

Agreed. It's a niche though.

Which car to your eye would be todays TVR?

Good question.

Personally I don't think it's out there at the moment.

From a performance perspective I think the Chevrolet corvette is the closest physical competitor and philosophy to aim for. Affordably priced "blue collar" engineering, it's incredibly capable and spends it's money where it counts, however it lacks the TVR's charm. That's no bad thing... it's a corvette, not a TVR, but it's a damn good mass produced benchmark IMO.

TVR can build a budget super-car with a British slant. It needs big grunt, plenty of noise and fun and yet that slightly eccentric British interior which surrounds you and reminds you that your in something special. It needs to make every drive an occasion, something to make you smile.

And it needs to be accessible to everyone, something the average Joe in the street will enjoy and give the thumbs up toward.

This...



crossed with this

Edited by skyrover on Monday 12th October 21:46

[m3jappa]

People go on and on about it being impossible to build a relatively basic but fast and decent handling British sports car.

However I look at cars which are 'around' 60k and I do use the term around quite loosely.

Porsche caymen, merc c63, various lotus, I'm sure I saw some ex demo exige s's for around 60k? Corvettes, mustangs,bmw m4's m3's 1m, the various fast golfs etc boxsters, jags, focus rs type things. Some of these are 30-40k and pretty loaded? Obviously a golf isn't a sports car but they have some power now, dsg gearboxes, easy to tune to proper power etc

Now yes some or most of these are large companies with big budgets, big parts bins, big resources etc but then I look at it and wonder what the profit margin is on a 911 turbo vs a caymen gt4, I mean is there really over 50k in parts alone worth of difference? Are they making Hughes losses on the cheaper cars? Why make them then, are the components utter crap?

The other thing is some of the cars mentioned above are pretty complicated cars, packed with all sorts of crap that a new tvr won't have.
Are the large manufacturers simply making huge profits, are the new tvr happy to make maybe 10-20k per car? I don't know. I can sit here and make a fag packet calculation on what a new tvr could cost, then I could say well, they get a better deal on parts than you or I would. Of course I have no clue on overheads for this type of buisness which are no doubt silly.

All I know is that I hope and prey it looks like a modern day Tuscan or sag, goes as well, handles and feels great and that I can succeed in being able to one day buy one.

[Walford]

m3jappa said:

Are they making Hughes losses on the cheaper cars? Why make them then, are the components utter crap?

No the cheaper cars are produce in higher volumes,

[DonkeyApple]

m3jappa said:

People go on and on about it being impossible to build a relatively basic but fast and decent handling British sports car.

However I look at cars which are 'around' 60k and I do use the term around quite loosely.

Porsche caymen, merc c63, various lotus, I'm sure I saw some ex demo exige s's for around 60k? Corvettes, mustangs,bmw m4's m3's 1m, the various fast golfs etc boxsters, jags, focus rs type things. Some of these are 30-40k and pretty loaded? Obviously a golf isn't a sports car but they have some power now, dsg gearboxes, easy to tune to proper power etc

Now yes some or most of these are large companies with big budgets, big parts bins, big resources etc but then I look at it and wonder what the profit margin is on a 911 turbo vs a caymen gt4, I mean is there really over 50k in parts alone worth of difference? Are they making Hughes losses on the cheaper cars? Why make them then, are the components utter crap?

The other thing is some of the cars mentioned above are pretty complicated cars, packed with all sorts of crap that a new tvr won't have.
Are the large manufacturers simply making huge profits, are the new tvr happy to make maybe 10-20k per car? I don't know. I can sit here and make a fag packet calculation on what a new tvr could cost, then I could say well, they get a better deal on parts than you or I would. Of course I have no clue on overheads for this type of buisness which are no doubt silly.

All I know is that I hope and prey it looks like a modern day Tuscan or sag, goes as well, handles and feels great and that I can succeed in being able to one day buy one.

When you still down an awful lot of that mRgin is derived from being able to put all those parts together in as short a time as possible, using as few salaries as possible in the cheapest square cottage possible.

What puts the small British manufacturer offside so quickly is not so much the having to pay a bit more for every component but the fact that it requires more labour to assemble the unit, it takes more time to assemble as it is more manual than automated and that base labour cost is much higher in the UK. And on top of that, manual assembly takes up more square footage as do more staff and land is already higely expensive in the UK.

I think this is why the iStream process brings so much value. My understanding is that it reduces time per unit, amount of labour units per car and square footage requires. It is also very scaleable so you can vary your operational costs as product demands change.

While the engine woes clearly impacted on TVR of old what really killed them was being massively, massively overstaffed and completely unable to adjust to falling demand. As an already cash stripped company they were paying millions for half their work force to sit and do nothing. The company was never going to survive the Credit Crunch anyway.

If the new TVR were building cars the old way then I'd reckon there would be no profit ever and the venture was clearly doomed but maybe the iStream process does bring these massive and vital savings that bring down the labour and land costs dramatically?

[TA14]

DonkeyApple said:

While the engine woes clearly impacted on TVR of old what really killed them was being massively, massively overstaffed and completely unable to adjust to falling demand. As an already cash stripped company they were paying millions for half their work force to sit and do nothing. The company was never going to survive the Credit Crunch anyway.

That's almost a chicken and egg situation. The over staffing was caused by the loss of sales which was caused by the S6 engine issue.

[900T-R]

DonkeyApple said:

While the engine woes clearly impacted on TVR of old what really killed them was being massively, massively overstaffed and completely unable to adjust to falling demand. As an already cash stripped company they were paying millions for half their work force to sit and do nothing.

With 20/20 hindsight they should have stayed at the 5-700 cars per annum that their whole structure was comfortable with, and let the waiting list grow Morgan-style during those short years when TVR was flavour of the month.

A positive side effect would have been the weeding out of the less committed who just wanted a flash car and were expecting mass market style appliance characteristics, which a 2 year waiting list in the late(ish) 1990s was sure to achieve.

Wholly agree that a novel way to develop and build cars on a low volume basis is integral to the chances of new TVR. While the 'building blocks' of the iStream process may or may not be all that new, it will be the way they are integrated that makes it potentially game-changing for operations on this kind of scale.

Meanwhile, I gather not all is well with giant automotive corporations, either.

[DonkeyApple]

TA14 said:

DonkeyApple said:

While the engine woes clearly impacted on TVR of old what really killed them was being massively, massively overstaffed and completely unable to adjust to falling demand. As an already cash stripped company they were paying millions for half their work force to sit and do nothing. The company was never going to survive the Credit Crunch anyway.

That's almost a chicken and egg situation. The over staffing was caused by the loss of sales which was caused by the S6 engine issue.

Yes, kind of.

When you look at the accounts (we did this many moons ago), what you saw was that before they went down the S6 route the company was having huge amounts of cash taken out of it and at the same time sales figures were on the wane. The S6 just massively and unnecessarily sped up the decline by trigger a sales slump.

Cost cutting on infrastructure and development such as the S6 while refusing to restructure the labour force to be more efficient, combined with stripping it of its cash and assets all conspired to kill it. But the lack of cash and the huge labour spend would have categorically meant it would have died in the Crunch anyway, with or without the S6.

It's why I don't truly subscribe to some people's arguments that TVR today can's survive because it died in 2006 as the market showed no one wanted these types of cars. Most of us appreciate that it died because it was run into the ground and starved of investment, whether we believe it was because of the S6 or because of the asset stripping and the refusal to invest in the future, we don't believe it was because demand for the concept disappeared.

Sure, potential numbers will almost certainly be a fraction of what they once were as there is now a plethora of choices and many people who bought a TVR in the past certainly did so because they were cheaper than what they really wanted and I suspect you won't really see that this time, given the starting price and where that price is going to go but it will be very, very sad if TVR get the formula right for a modern but still 'rough and ready' yet luxury sports car that's as exciting to drive at 40 in a 60 as it is to drive at 60 in a 60 and we find that there aren't a couple of hundred Britons a year who don't want the same as everyone else, a do everything, not at all exciting, mass produced, generic sportscar. But both Morgan and Lotus show to me that there is hope.

[DonkeyApple]

900T-R said:

DonkeyApple said:

While the engine woes clearly impacted on TVR of old what really killed them was being massively, massively overstaffed and completely unable to adjust to falling demand. As an already cash stripped company they were paying millions for half their work force to sit and do nothing.

With 20/20 hindsight they should have stayed at the 5-700 cars per annum that their whole structure was comfortable with, and let the waiting list grow Morgan-style during those short years when TVR was flavour of the month.

A positive side effect would have been the weeding out of the less committed who just wanted a flash car and were expecting mass market style appliance characteristics, which a 2 year waiting list in the late(ish) 1990s was sure to achieve.

Wholly agree that a novel way to develop and build cars on a low volume basis is integral to the chances of new TVR. While the 'building blocks' of the iStream process may or may not be all that new, it will be the way they are integrated that makes it potentially game-changing for operations on this kind of scale.

Meanwhile, I gather not all is well with giant automotive corporations, either.

Yes, a waiting list, cash in the bank, investing in ever more efficient production and monetising the aftermarket upgrades.

But in fairness to PW, the world changed awfully quickly in the late 90s and it's a hell of a lot easier for us to look back than it was to look forward back then.

[Alex]

Price is an issue. In 1996, a Griffith was £27,500 compared with say, a Porsche 911, which was around £60k.

For the performance, that made it a bargain, and is one of the reasons they sold so well.

[DonkeyApple]

Alex said:

Price is an issue. In 1996, a Griffith was £27,500 compared with say, a Porsche 911, which was around £60k.

For the performance, that made it a bargain, and is one of the reasons they sold so well.

Price is a science and an art, that's for sure. Too cheap and the market for aspirational goods goes against you, too dear and you lose too much bread and butter revenue.

Last time I looked at a 911 the Turbo was over £100k and that was many years ago. And I've read that Porsche want to move all their price points higher so as to reduce volumes and protect margins, akin to the mainstream supercar manufacturers. I'm guessing the £200k 911 isn't a million years away.

At £70k plus there probably isn't the kind of bang4buck of before but then I doubt they'll be selling 2000 cars a year as they were before.

The other way to look at it is that you can spec up a travelling coat hanger vendor's utility transport to over £70k these days so maybe the new TVR is comically cheap?

[Peanus]

I've never driven a TVR. I've never ridden in a TVR. But I've seen a TVR and I've heard a TVR, and so long as I get to see them and hear them again, I'm more than a happy advocate of neo-TVR.

Let's hope that whatever they do, they do it right.

[Ozzie Osmond]

In the hey-day, most TVRs sold were relatively cheap "big sportscars" with good performance for the money. Unsophisticated, but it didn't matter at that price. Chimaera outsold everything else in the range by a country mile. TVR only sold a tiny number of the most expensive cars and it never really did the business any good, their in-house engine (why?) being famously disastrous. Similarly Morgan churn out around 1,000 vehicles each year - the vast majority bread & butter models with just a smattering of the very expensive Aero range. I mean, how often do you see them on the road? I believe some are now discontinued.

The truly difficult juggling exercise is how to build your cars cheap enough to attract customers while selling them expensively enough to make a profit. Just ask Spyker.

One huge problem in the "expensive sportscar" market is that a tiny handful of wealthy customers who will buy something just to be different will never justify a car maker's existence - unless the maker can charge a massive price for its cars. When did you last see a new Noble on the road? They used to be viable when priced with Esprit, 911 and similar cars but I've never yet seen an M600 (that's £200,000 to you, Sir) on the road. Meanwhile in a few weeks time you'll be able to buy a fully engineered McLaren for the price of a 911 turbo.

The guys promoting new-TVR look like serious players and I hope it works out for them. Gordon Murray remains a well respected name despite lukewarm sales of his Light Car Company "Rocket" and the Mac-Merc "SLR", both savagely expensive when they were on sale.

[DonkeyApple]

It almost makes you think that once the enormous roar of the big V8 in the LE model and their race car quiet end down the most popular model will be the 2 litre one.

I've assumed that to get enough volume to be a stable, small business that one of their 4 proposed models won't just be a different shape but have a smaller engine and price tag.

For youngsters, ladies and people who would like to be part of the brand but without the same huge expense of the halo cars. It's been a key move for Porsche. And most of the more premium sports cars manufacturers have a version with a smaller engine that supplies essential sales volume.

[HarryW]

DonkeyApple said:

It almost makes you think that once the enormous roar of the big V8 in the LE model and their race car quiet end down the most popular model will be the 2 litre one.

I've assumed that to get enough volume to be a stable, small business that one of their 4 proposed models won't just be a different shape but have a smaller engine and price tag.

For youngsters, ladies and people who would like to be part of the brand but without the same huge expense of the halo cars. It's been a key move for Porsche. And most of the more premium sports cars manufacturers have a version with a smaller engine that supplies essential sales volume.

A blown 4 pot cossie lump would create the right vibe.

Do you live in Surrey DA.......

[DonkeyApple]

HarryW said:

A blown 4 pot cossie lump would create the right vibe.

Do you live in Surrey DA.......

NW3 but the car goes in that direction for servicing.

I think in a world where everyone is downsizing including Ferrari and Porsche and given TVRs past use of smaller engines, especially that 2L unit for the Italian import market? Then I wouldn't see anything wrong with TVR offering a small pot model if it meant being notably cheaper and would increase sales volumes.

We all love big V8s but if a smaller engine will get more younger people into the brand then that has to be a good thing.

If the car is as light as mooted then in reality a 2L would give the same sort of performance as the old Chims and Griffs and be a fantastic proposition and a fun little car.

[900T-R]

Ford's 3.7L crate V6 would be a prime candidate for a later lower-tier model I'd have thought. Fits in well historically, too. (y)

I'd steer clear of four bangers - the sound quality of TVRs being a major USP and set to become even bigger as all the world around them has needed to switch to efficient and powerful, but utterly anodyne 4-cyl. turbo engines (old Saab and Scooby lumps excepted to a degree - but the first is dead and the second drinks and emits as much as a proper engine, anyway ).