Les Edgar's TVR isn't Vapourware

Words by Robert Percy

Oh, TVR. How you climb so high and fall so far. The legendary British sports car manufacturer has had more than its fair share of hard times and that’s putting it mildly. The beleaguered company has lurched from owner to owner and bailout to bailout so many times you’d be forgiven for just giving up on them entirely. In fact, many of us did after Russian billionaire Nikolai Smolensky failed to turn the company’s fortunes around in the mid 00s. Even the absolutely mental Sagaris (now one of the most legendary TVRs of all time) couldn’t save TVR from going well and truly bust.

A glimmer of hope seemed to be on the horizon when a consortium of enthusiasts led by Les Edgar bought the entire ownership of TVR off of Smolensky in 2013. That glimmer turned into something much brighter when Edgar & co. announced the formation of TVR Parts Ltd. in 2014, a side hustle dedicated to providing genuine TVR parts worldwide for any older cars that might need them. As you’d expect, owners and fans of older TVRs absolutely rejoiced.

The TVR Sagaris - the last hurrah of the “classic” TVR before Nikolai Smolensky axed the company and sold it to Les Edgar’s consortium.

Then, in June 2015, things really started to pick up. It was announced that a brand new TVR had been in development for more than a year and was being developed in conjunction with Cosworth and Gordon Murray Design. It would be a proper, classic TVR updated for the current era. A 5.0 litre Cosworth-tweaked Ford V8 at the front pushing out 450-500+hp (depending on what model you wanted) driving the rear wheels through a 6 speed manual gearbox. Initially codenamed T37, it was later christened with one of the most iconic names in TVR’s history; Griffith. The projected delivery time for the new Griffith and the full rebirth of TVR itself was supposed to be at some point during 2017, with a whole other gamut of brand new TVR models being released over the next 10 years as part of an extensive business plan to get the wheels fully rolling for TVR again.

The Welsh government even got involved, buying a 3% share in the company in 2016 as well as providing them with a £2 million loan and helping them find a factory in Ebbw Vale that was waiting to be snapped up by a new owner. This is something which would provide some much needed and incredibly valuable jobs to Ebbw Vale, a town in an extremely poor part of the UK where, much like the industrial north, unemployment is a real problem. This factory, formerly owned by Techpoint, would have been adjacent to the much-maligned Circuit of Wales project, something which might be worth an entire article in itself in the future… But I digress.

TVR’s new (and still yet to be refurbished) factory in Ebbw Vale

Of course, like any new or revived car company that’s eagerly pushing out a new model, this new version of TVR started taking deposits early. Plenty of people, including the ever-popular car YouTuber Shmee150, paid in. It seems like the people with the kind of cash to spare to get a brand new ultra-modern TVR really wanted to buy into Les Edgar’s consortium’s dream of a reborn manufacturer run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. Can you blame them really? TVR is a brand with so much emotional weight (maybe a tinge of nostalgia, even?) to it. Of course, we all know the dangers of deposits going unfulfilled. We also all know the dangers of companies like Tesla offering $100, $1,000 or even $10,000+ deposits on cars that aren’t even anywhere close to production-ready yet. But, it seemed like the new Griffith really was something tangible that could be on your driveway tomorrow.

Well, as you probably know by now, it’s May 2020. There’s still no sign of production versions of the new TVR Griffith. We aren’t hearing any roaring Cosworth-tuned V8s amongst the British countryside, at car meets or at run what you brung track days. The only working car is the prototype, which was only recently registered with the DVLA as a street legal vehicle. Only a few of the people who put actual money down for the new Griffith have even seen or been in a ride in the prototype car. Work on the factory is at a stalemate due to the factory building needing much more serious work than they’d anticipated. The company’s social media accounts have crawled to a standstill. The only little bits of news that we do hear from TVR usually come from people who are on the mailing list leaking the details on forums, which then end up in the hands of journalists like ourselves afterwards.

From how much we know right now, the launch date of the new Griffith was supposed to be around the middle of 2020, but who knows if that’ll even happen right now thanks to COVID-19 wreaking havoc all across the globe. I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re probably thinking that the TVR dream is becoming nothing more than the most dreaded term in the automotive startup world: Vaporware.

To start things off, I think it’s really unfair to say that the new TVR Griffith and by extension the entire TVR dream itself is a piece of vaporware. There is a physical prototype car in existence and it is fully street legal. People have actually seen it (and filmed it!) driving around on the streets of London. Shmee150 took a ride with Les Edgar in that same car not that long ago and filmed it for his YouTube channel, as well as following it around London once it became registered and fully legal to drive on the road. It’s been to motor shows and motoring events all over the place, including Goodwood!

Whilst there may not be any kind of production going on right now, TVR have already got past the first stage of the process of proving your product isn’t a piece of vaporware. They have an actual, fully working, fully drivable and pretty much fully developed car that’s fully homologated and street legal. How many of the new EV and supercar startups that keep popping up out of almost absolutely nowhere have even body shells for motor show stands, let alone fully working and fully road legal prototypes? I bet you can count that number on your fingers

The Rebellion R13 - the car that bore TVR’s name and their (sort of?) official return to motorsport.

It’s also not like TVR’s been idle either without any production cars or a factory. It’s been racing during the time it’s been active again as a company! TVR returned to the world of endurance racing in 2018 through a partnership with Rebellion Racing. Whilst the still production car-less were only a partner of the team, it still meant the TVR logo was plastered across the side of the car. Rebellion Racing actually did pretty well too, with their cars finishing 4th and 3rd by the end of the 2018-2019 season and 4th and 5th in the 2019-2020 season afterward. With this kind of racing partnership, it’s not like TVR aren’t serious about being a proper, fully-fledged sports car company. Of course the big hope is that eventually TVR will be able to put its own factory-developed cars into motorsport. Maybe a fully fire-breathing GT racing Griffith will come soon. We can only hope.

There’s also those factory problems. Oh boy. TVR really hasn't had a lot of luck with this, has it? It’s almost comical in some ways how delayed the renovation of the factory in Ebbw Vale is now. With the announcement of a factory in one of the most deprived areas in the whole of Europe, not just the UK, where there really is a critical shortage of jobs, you’d think that the rebuilding of the factory would be one of the biggest priorities for TVR. Well, considering the Welsh government got involved in the company, it definitely was. It wasn’t even a totally new factory either; it was an already existing one that just needed a refresh. Unfortunately, that refresh has turned out to be much more of a pain than was expected.

You only have to look at how work on the factory has been at pretty much a complete standstill for a while now. I even went past the factory around the end of December on the way to see a family friend in Herefordshire and I didn’t see any notable activity whatsoever. The problem, apparently, is that the building is pretty… well… dangerous. Amongst other things, it was damaged during an illegal rave in 2018! Tt’ll take a lot of money to fix that damage and the only way TVR’s going to get that is if it comes from the EU via the prodding of the Welsh government. Still, it’s not something that’s an impossible request. I’m sure that eventually the money will surface and things will get underway in the industrial heartland of the Welsh valleys.

As you can see, there isn’t much going on at the TVR factory in Ebbw Vale…

The real issue with TVR isn’t that their product is vaporware or that even the company is vaporware. The problem with TVR is that they’ve just had an absolutely unbelievable amount of setbacks on their journey to a full rebirth. If TVR is like a phoenix rising from the ashes, it’s a phoenix that’s come crashing down quite a lot on its journey up into the sky. Like any automotive startup or automotive resurrection, TVR has had to deal with problems. A lot of them. But this is TVR. TVR has always had its difficulties and, just like what happened in the past, it’ll find some way to overcome them. Basically, TVR is like the country that birthed it. Britain has endured a hell of a lot over its long and tumultuous history.

There’s been big highs and big lows. As Britons, we’ve enjoyed periods of glorious stability and peace, periods of terrifying war and periods where we were so worried about our finances we were wondering whether we were going to be able to pay off the debt. But no matter what happens, we always carry on. In that sense, there has never been a car company more quintessentially British than TVR. We’ll be fine. We always will. We’re just in a bit of a bad spot right now. The same goes for TVR.