TVR owner Nikolai Smolenski has taken the tiny English car firm on a ride wilder than anything you could get from a Speed 12 (pictured), and now he’s riding the name right out of the car business. Telling Autocar that the production possibilities don’t make financial sense anymore, he is instead repurposing the hardcore brand into “a new venture building portable wind turbines.”
We’d say this is a rather odd thing to do with TVR, but the young Russian’s run at the captain’s wheel has been just this kind of odd since the beginning. The last two years have featured infrequent reports of some kind of new TVR vehicle on the way at some point, powered by either a General Motors LS3 V8, the Corvette ZR1’s 638-horsepower LS9, a 3.0-liter, six-cylinder turbodiesel from the BMW 335d, or an electric system.
Smolenski, from TVR’s new Vienna base, says the company built three evaluation cars, one with that LS3, one with a BMW twin-turbo V8, and one with a 100-kW electric motor. But he believes that with a necessary base price of £100,000 (about $155,000 U.S.) for any of them, they’d be too expensive to sell at the profit he wants – even with a manufacturing tie-up with Caterham.
So now TVR will get into the business of making a lot of air – we’ll refrain from any (further) jokes. We’re not sure what this does to the TVR ‘rebirth’ of a few months ago; regardless, we’ll toast the TVR that was and hope it can rest in peace now.
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