Headquarters: Blackpool, England, UK
Established: 1947
Founder(s): Trevor Wilkinson

Trevor Wilkinson founded TVR, a British maker of hand-built sports cars, in 1947. TVR has always emphasized light weight, high power, and overall simplicity, omitting driver aids like traction control and antilock brakes. Early models used small-displacement engines from other manufacturers, wrapped in a fiberglass body on a tubular steel chassis.

The nimble TVR Grantura sports car, introduced in 1958, was originally designed for four-cylinder engines up to 1.5 liters, but, in 1962, American tuner Jack Griffith dropped a small-block Ford V8 into a Grantura's engine bay. TVR agreed to supply additional chassis, and the Grantura became the Griffith 200, a small beast of a car with up to 271 horsepower. TVR itself produced a V8 sports car, the Tuscan, from 1967 to 1970. In recent years, TVR has built its own engines in-house. The 4.0-liter Speed Six powers two variants of the latest TVR Tuscan, which launched in 2000. The Tuscan S street version uses a 380 horsepower version, and the Tuscan R, which can be configured as an all-out racer, boasts 450 horsepower and enhanced aerodynamics.

In the late 1990s, TVR built and campaigned a GT1 race car powered by a 7.7-liter V12 consisting of two Speed Sixes mated to a common crankcase. In 2000, TVR built a prototype street version of this 2,200-lb, 800 horsepower racer, named the Cerbera Speed 12. It was one of the fastest road cars ever built. In 2005, TVR introduced the Sagaris, a sports car designed for endurance racing.