A pipe dream called TVR
03/27/2013
Some stories only become apparent after extensive research, like this one. At the age of 17, when I had caught the car bug at an early age, as a fan of English sports cars I approached the then Swiss TVR importer Heinz Kobel and asked for a sales brochure by letter (we were still decades away from the age of email), for which I naturally suggested that I intended to buy despite having no cash.
Well, Mr. Kobel politely wrote back that a demonstration car would be available if I was interested and immediately enclosed the requested brochure, on which the car was also pictured.
Since I didn't even have a driver's license yet and the 27,000 francs I was asking for was beyond any imagination anyway, the car remained a pipe dream.
Many years later, I bought a red TVR Roadster to finally make my dream come true. Over the years, after extensive research, the history of the car began to come together and it turned out that I had bought the very car that had been offered to me as a demonstration car around 20 years earlier and that was also pictured on the back of the Swiss sales brochure.
In the meantime, the red color had been partially restored to the original silver tone, which could still be seen in some places, and so the sporty roadster looked exactly as it did when it was delivered in 1978.
Other aspects of the history and further background information on the TVR 3000S can be found in the recently published vehicle report .
