AutoCult TVR Tasmin 280i Coupé (RHD) (1980) (Great Britain)

About the Original:

Performance makes the Difference

The British automobile manufacturer TVR – founded in 1947 – became famous especially for its sports cars.

One highlight of TVR was the type Tasmin, which was created in the second half of the 1970s. The name Tasmin resulted from the mixture of the girls name Tamsin and the name of the Australian/ New Zealand race series Tasman-Series, which took place from 1964 to 1975. Available from 1980, the new sports car was fitted with a revolutionary car body. Whereas roundish shapes usually characterized the cars made in Blackpool, the TVR Tasmin was furnished with an edged plastic car body. Responsible for the change in design was the Briton Oliver Winterbottom – a former designer of Lotus-Sportscars, who recently joined TVR. As he did it for Lotus, Winterbottom fitted the sports car with baked in pop-up headlamps. Whereas the car body was made in-house, the drive components were manly obtained from Ford. The engineers of TVR proceeded quite unconventional and used everything suitable they could find. They mounted the manual gearbox of a Ford Cortina, the differential and the rear anti-lock disk brakes of a Jaguar XJ-S and the built-in front anti-lock disk brakes usually did their job in a Ford Granada. The Tasmin was offered with two different engines - both made by Ford in Cologne - a 2,8 liter V6 engine with 162 HP and a 4-cylinder straight engine with 101 HP produced by 2,0 liter capacity. The designation 280i marked the strong V6 engine and the 4-cylinder engine was tagged with the number 200.

From 1981 until end of production of the type Tasmin in 1984 only 16 coupes and 45 convertibles of the 4-cylinder version were manufactured, whereas the 6-cylinder version reached a number of totaled 980 cars (118 coupes and 862 convertibles).