Adam Burdette and Jean Michel Santacreu are now joint managing partners of TVR. Both men are American nationals who are neighbours in Florida. N Smolenski has no plans to be part of the management team although he said he would consider it if he was asked to join the new managers.
N Smolenski stated that as he did not want to become involved in a long drawn-out legal process, he surrended all rights to the TVR badge and then bought it back.
He criticised the MP for Blackpool, Mrs Hamble for lack of support for him and said that her voice was "very small". He also stated that he had no support from local government and that Britain does not support industry.
"In answer to the question, "Will you honour the warranty?" he replied unequivocally, "We intend to pick up the warranty".
"He anticipated that Jensen would be taking over part of what remains of the factory but that "Blackpool production does not work." Although he accepted that the workers were not highly paid and the move to production abroad was not for cheaper labour.
The new owners intent is to :
Establish a new structure for TVR; to produce 5000 cars worldwide; 2000 of these cars will be targeted at America, the majority of the remainder towards the EU and 'the east', including Japan. It is expected that initially 250 cars will be available for Britain, although they will sell "as many as the market demands"; Ricardo will produce the engine; Bertone is the first option for final assembly of the car, however Pinin Farina, Lotus (Simon Croft, Lotus production manager, was at the conference), and others were considered.
Initially the Sagaris and Tuscan (maybe with a new name) GTs will be produced within 60-90 days but towards the end of this year or early 2008 they will produce their world car which will have airbags with the possibility of traction control being considered.
"The cars are to remain 'English' although we assume they meant British. Despite 2 months of bad press, there has been 60 years of success and "people still want our cars".
Both owners stated that there was still 6-9 months of development work on the new car(s)? still to do but that "some of the work has been done already.
