The Classic Car That Lived And Died Before The Social Media Fad

Analog cars are making a comeback. People are bored with letting electronics have all the fun, making anyone feel like a superhero behind the wheel when, if it wasn’t for the 1s and 0s flying around the car’s brain, they’d be unceremoniously wrapped around a tree.

Social media can take some of the credit for this renewed interest in the authentic. Tastes and trends can be monitored by the minute, propelling cars into the zeitgeist and making or breaking reputations. While this is undoubtedly helpful for modern-day manufacturers, it came too late for one car that could have been a favorite.

Generating Adoration Pre-Internet Was Tough

Social media today offers manufacturers a direct line of communication to fans and consumers 24/7, but pre-internet opportunities were far fewer. Advertising spaces were battlegrounds, as were racetracks where manufacturers had more than a result on the line—their entire livelihoods were at stake.

Of course, TV and film were also a huge gateway to mainstream success. Was the DeLorean DMC-12 a good car? Arguably, no. But how many people have bought one because it was in Back to the Future? Would the Aston Martin DB5 be remembered today if it weren’t for its appearances with James Bond behind the wheel? Would the Toyota Supra have risen to its cult status if it wasn’t for Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner’s “ten-second car”?

There are plenty of cars, both good and bad, that never got their chance at stardom. And one of them was from that most unorthodox car manufacturer, TVR.

TVR Is British Eccentricity In Automotive Form

TVR has always done things a little differently. For a start, there’s the name. Some of the greatest sports car manufacturers, like Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche, Bugatti, Pagani, and, to a degree, McLaren and Aston Martin, all opted for their founder’s surname. First names are usually reserved for models, like the Enzo, Dino, Elise, and Jesko, but TVR founder Trevor Wilkinson chose his first name for the car company, bucking the trend.

Giving your company your first name isn’t the extent of it, though; we could also look at previous employees. You’d expect to see former racers or motoring journalists among a sports car manufacturer’s alumni, but again, TVR differs on that front. Alfie Boe is an internationally-renowned tenor, most well-known for playing lead Jean Valjean in the 25th anniversary concert of Les Misérables, but he got his start polishing cars in TVR’s Blackpool, UK factory (itself an oddity, being that Blackpool more commonly known as a popular seaside holiday destination).

Arguably, though, the most notable example of TVR’s quirkiness is in their commitment towards driver safety. Or rather, its utter disdain for it. See, while manufacturers take a great deal of care in providing electronic assistance to ensure their customers can enjoy their car and continue to live to buy another one, TVR doesn’t concern itself with such frippery. And TVR’s Cerbera is one of its wildest.

The TVR Cerbera Doesn’t Care About Your Safety

Everything about the TVR Cerbera wants to kill you. It has no ABS. It has no traction control. It has no airbags. It has no real crumple zones. It has very little in the way of “safety” at all, really. What it does have is a roll cage, a long throttle pedal to help manipulate power, and, at the top end, a 4.5-liter V8 making 440 horsepower that gets to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds and reaches a top speed of 193 mph.

Hell, even the name “Cerbera” has two deadly meanings. The first comes from the Greek legend of the three-headed dog Cerberus, who guarded the gates of the underworld to stop the dead from leaving. The other is for the Cerbera odollam, which is a highly poisonous genus of tree colloquially known as the “suicide tree” for the amount of pain it inflicts on contact. Don’t say TVR didn’t try to warn you about this car.

Now, you might feasibly think that this unbridled performance came with an exclusionary price tag. Surely a car like this, which at the time was only beaten on acceleration by the Ferrari F50, the McLaren F1, and the Porsche GT1, would cost enough to prevent all but an elite few from becoming unwitting organ donors? Well, you must not know about things that come out of Blackpool.

The seaside town is famed for its cheap thrills and, with a £40,000 ($53,068) price tag at the time (equivalent of $105,994 today) the Cerbera was certainly one of them. Sure, it’s not what you’d call conventionally cheap, but it accelerated faster than the at-the-time $80,000 Lotus Esprit V8, $130,000 Ferrari F355, and $200,000 Lamborghini Diablo.

It’s Not Just Safety Where The Cerbera Didn’t Conform

Unsurprisingly for a car whose name basically means “Trevor Suicide Tree”, the Cerbera’s outlandishness started before you’d even got in. Take opening the door, for example. You’ll notice that there are no handles, no latches to pull. Opening the door is instead accomplished by pressing a button underneath the wing mirror, which allows you inside.

Okay, you’re in, but it’s warm. To cool the car down, you find the two air conditioning dials the car has—one for a hot fan, one for a cold fan—and turn the cold up. Then you can put the window down, not by a roller or a button on the door, but by one of the unmarked buttons next to the stereo. That’s after you’ve put your coat in the trunk by pressing the Cerbera badge on the rear of the car to open it.

These design choices, along with many others made at TVR HQ, might sound weird for the sake of weird, but they were actually very deliberate. TVRs were driver-first to the extreme, wanting the driving experience to be as pure and unfiltered as possible. While the car itself might have wanted to kill its driver, its designers wanted the driver to live in the moment. The oddly placed dials, the confusing buttons, and the lack of electronics all made the driver focus, making the car uniquely TVR in more ways than one.

The King Of The Outcasts

TVR’s eschewing of the norm led to its creation of the Cerbera, which became the marque’s flagship model. The Cerbera was the most powerful, fastest TVR drivers could buy at the time, and it even had its own in-house engine in the Speed Eight (AJP8) which helped to forge the brand’s identity further.

It was an entirely unique car that could have been the darling of power-hungry, oddity-loving social media users everywhere if it only had the chance.

First released in 1996 and discontinued in 2006, the Cerbera lived and died before social media really got going. Facebook was only established in 2004, while YouTube came around in 2006. It wasn’t until 2010 that Instagram was launched, and TikTok first started destroying attention spans in 2016, some ten years after the Cerbera was put to pasture.

As such, it wasn’t really the sales powerhouse TVR had hoped for. Only 1,490 cars were sold in its lifetime, primarily in the UK. Examples in the US are rare but not entirely unavailable today, selling for just north of $30,000 on average.

The Upcoming Griffith Could Get TVR The Attention It Deserves

The Cerbera wasn’t the only thing to go under in 2006, as the TVR brand went into administration that same year. It was one in a number of similar incidents for the company, and unfortunately there have been no cars sold since. They did have plans to release a Griffith V8 in 2019, however that date was pushed back multiple times. You can place a £5,000 deposit for the 5.0-liter car on the TVR site today, though you’d possibly have to be as brave to drive it as you would to put money down on a car that was originally slated for the roads seven years ago.

Ultimately, the Cerbera was just a bit too niche for the world. An oddball car from a boutique British brand that suffered from the reliability and quality control synonymous with vehicles from the country.

Perhaps if it was released today it could have been mentioned in the same breath as something like the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50; a similarly unconventional car from Britain. But, for now, the Cerbera is relegated to the annals of history, prevented from leaving the underworld that its namesake protects. A memory and a legacy of taking on the big boys and winning the battle, but losing the war. And that’s worth more than a few likes and shares on an app any day.

Sources: Cerbera.co.uk, Number 27 YouTube, Classic and Sports Car, Classic.com