TVR Made Some of the Wildest Cars of the 2000s, and Soon You Can Import Them

There’s a virtual tsunami of sports car insanity heading for us, and most enthusiasts are blissfully unaware of it. From right now, through around 2030 or so, some of the most bonkers hand-built sports cars ever made will become legal to import here into the U.S. (under this country’s 25-year import rule). Over 400 hp, under 2400 pounds, and no driver aids (not even ABS). They’re the stuff of auto journalist fever dreams, only they’re real. They just live an ocean away. They’re the TVRs of 1994-2006, and if you didn’t read about them in British mags like Top Gear or Evo a few decades ago, or drive them with your thumbs on Forza or Gran Turismo, you may never have even heard of them.

Now that the Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R is legal, the big wave of JDM anticipation is petering out. The next big juicy slice of forbidden fruit—the TVR Sagaris, and its siblings the Cerbera, Chimaera, Griffith, Tuscan, Typhon, Tamora and T350—are going to come from the original right-hand-drive country, Great Britain.

Founded in 1946 in Blackpool, England, TVR was always a small, cottage-industry/boutique sports car company that built compact, entertaining and occasionally overpowered two-seaters that typically punched above their weight. In the early 1990s, though, TVR went positively insane. First, they stuffed aluminum Rover V-8s into lightweight sports cars with gorgeous fiberglass bodies, draped over a tube chassis. The Chimaera, Griffith and later Cerbera (named for the mythical multi-headed dog that guarded the gates of hell) were TVR’s first shots across the bow of the sports car world.

But we weren’t lucky enough to see them on this side of the pond. Burned by its failure in the U.S. in the late 1980s, TVR stopped selling cars in America for good around 1987. Most of the 1990s and later TVRs, then, carved up British B-roads, although a few left-hand drive cars were made mainly for the continental European market. Like other over-ambitious, under-funded sports car manufacturers (see, Pegaso, ATS, and ASA), TVR even built their own engines for a time, the Alwyn Melling-designed flat-plane-crank Speed Eight (V-8), and Speed Six (I-6).

For a prospective buyer, that last bit certainly sounds like a red flag, and it does indeed take a special kind of owner to maintain a bespoke engine built by a far away company that has been defunct for years. But, shockingly, there are several vendors out there who sell everything from ancillaries to complete engines. Happily, the TVR-built engines have also proven to be durable if they have had the prescribed maintenance done.

British magazines of the day loved TVR, not just for the cars themselves, but for the pure guts and determination that it took to build engines in-house and stick to the formula of light weight with no driver aids. Evo said of the brutal-looking Cerbera 2+2 coupe: “Brit-biceps rounded, with a daring lack of exterior clutter, this is TVR at its visual best, stocky and assertive.” 

The interiors were described as “visual acid trips” that looked wild but could be ergonomically wonky. Whereas older TVRs had been parts bin mashups, the cars of the late 1990s through the early 2000s sport switchgear that was both visually interesting (if sometimes a bit too clever) and utterly unique to TVR. The smaller, two-seater 1999-2006 Tuscan was also a favorite of Evo which named it to its list of Top 25 cars of a quarter century. Car summed it up as “a paradoxical melding of full control and explosive insanity.” Other TVRs to come out of this period were the 2002-06 Tamora, 2002-06 T350 and 2005-06 Sagaris, all powered by the proprietary Speed Six engine. Sadly this chapter of sports car history is all too brief. In 2004 TVR changed ownership, and over the next few years the company fell apart. Technically TVR still exists, but it hasn’t had a car in production since the 2000s.

The closest most Americans ever came to seeing a TVR of this era was in video games, online videos, or the eminently forgettable John Travolta action flick Swordfish. That’s changing, though, with more cars showing up in the U.S. under the 25-year rule, and in Canada where lucky enthusiasts can get a full decade jump on Americans. According to Gavin Bristow, co-founder of the TVR Garage in Arizona, which imports cars, and stocks parts, “Our clients are familiar with the TVR brand and parts of its history. Whether through Gran Turismo, the 90s video game, or the film Swordfish, or from back when TVR imported cars to the U.S. market [mainly the 1970s and 1980s. However, it’s our mission to broaden awareness of the brand in the U.S. market for those who crave a more visceral, and raw experience compared to the new sports cars available on the market today.”

A small subset of enthusiasts are even willing to buy cars that they can’t legally register in the U.S. for months, or even years. This has happened in the past with JDM favorites like the Nissan Skyline, but there appears to be appetite for TVRs as well. There also seems to be a sense that these cars have nowhere to go but up in value, and that by the time their legal importation dates come up, the train will have already left the station. TVR Garage thus offers the option for Americans to buy cars before their 25^th anniversary, and store them in either Canada or the UK. According the Bristow, several examples of the ultimate TVR, the Sagaris, have already been purchased in the UK with the sole purpose of being made ready for import to the U.S., a trip that won’t be made for at least four years. “The phrase ‘good things come to those who wait’ feels particularly relevant in this situation” said Bristow. “Will scarcity increase as we approach their eligibility? I believe so. Will prices increase to match such demand? Again, I believe so,” he says. And for those who live close to the Canadian border, and have the ability to register a car in Ontario, there’s at least the prospect of an occasional visit.