TVR History
November 21st, 2008 | by |Foundation
Trevor Wilkinson (14 May 1923 - 6 June 2008) was born in Blackpool and left school at 14 to start an engineering apprenticeship at a local garage. In 1946 he bought a wheelwright’s business in Blackpool, renaming it Trevcar Motors in 1947, for the purpose of selling and repairing cars and light engineering.
In 1947, Wilkinson built his first car, a special two-seater body on an Alvis Firebird chassis for himself. As a result, Wilkinson with partner Jack Pickard then started a separate company, TVR Engineering, with a name derived from Wilkinson’s name - TreVoR. Their first car was an alloy-bodied two seat body on a tubular chassis, which appeared in 1949.
In 1953 the concept of glass-reinforced plastic bodywork over a tubular steel backbone chassis was accepted, and continued throughout TVR’s current production history. In 1954, TVR Engineering was renamed TVR, in light of the launch of the first “production” car called the Mk1, later name Grantura. The glass fibre body design and layout remained, in modified form, until replaced by the angular wedge design Tasmin in 1980.
At launch in the 1950s, TVRs were powered by 4-cylinder engines from Coventry Climax, BMC or Ford, the performance models having Shorrock superchargers. As with many other British sports cars, engine sizes remained under two litres, and all produced less than 100 bhp (75 kW). As most TVRs were sold in the domestic British market, to avoid a British tax on assembled cars many of the early cars were sold in kit form - a practice which continued until the 1970s, when the tax loophole was closed and the kit-form option removed.
In April 1962 Wilkinson and Pickard left the company to set up a specialist fibre-glass engineering business. On retirement, Wilkinson moved to Minorca, Spain, where he died aged 85, on 6 June 2008.
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