TVR Isn’t Dead (Again) Just Yet

The tale of TVR’s planned relaunch over the last decade-and-a-bit has been as tumultuous as, well… the rest of TVR’s history. Here's a refresher: after the Blackpool-based sports car company went bankrupt for the umpteenth and what seemed like final time in 2006, its rights and assets were sold to businessman Les Edgar in 2013.

Cue the 2017 reveal of a reborn Griffith in the form of a brawny Ford V8-powered coupe part engineered by Gordon Murray, an ultimately abandoned government-funded plan to build it in Wales, a brief and deeply weird spell where the company announced electric plans and became a major sponsor of Formula E, and then, as the 2010s became the 2020s… a whole lot of nothing.

After well over a year of silence from the company, updates on Companies House – the UK’s publicly-accessible listing of registered companies – this summer indicated that the company’s CEO had resigned and that its 2024 financial statements were well overdue, seemingly spelling the end, once and for all, of this ill-fated relaunch.

But wait! TVR might just have been saved… again. It’s today been announced that the company has become part of Charge Holdings, with a view to making it part of a “multi-brand, low-volume integrated automotive group.”

And who, you might be asking, are Charge Holdings? As its name might suggest, it’s a holding company, its name coming from its (so far) biggest acquisition – Charge Cars. If that sounds a little more familiar, it’s because it caused a bit of a stir a few years ago with the Charge ’67, an electric-swapped first-gen Ford Mustang Fastback. That company went bust last year, but was rescued this January by what’s now Charge Holdings – and TVR is its next revival goal.

So wait – does this mean TVR’s going to start building EVs? Thankfully, no. Not to begin with, anyway. Charge says that “TVR’s immediate focus will remain on delivering the refreshed TVR Griffith to customers, continuing the marque’s legacy of high-performance internal combustion sports cars before expanding into new technologies in the future.”

So, 12 years after TVR’s revival plans kicked off, and seven years after we first saw the new Griffith, we might finally soon see it start to arrive with customers. Maybe. Possibly.