Can the home-grown, sports-car-in-a-shed industry survive?
By Ben Whitworth
Oct 15, 2007
Car Magazine
So Marcos is dead. Last week the Kenilworth-based car maker called in the receivers. Another small-volume British manufacturer bites the dust, I hear you say. And who can be surprised? Small-scale British car makers habitually promise much, deliver little and then go bust, in an all-too depressingly familiar cycle. But the news of the demise of Marcos touched a nerve in me. I went to see them just after sharp-talking Canadian magnate Tony Stelliga took over. And I honestly thought it stood a chance.
Stelliga seemed to have the right idea for Marcos. Not only did he enlist the help of Prodrive to help develop the car, he located the company premises slap bang next to Prodrive’s test facilities in Warwickshire. Then he roped in ex-TVR designer Damian McTaggart (the man behind TVR’s brutal Tuscan and Cerbera) to pen the first model, the TSO. Say what you like about TVR’s shoddy build quality and white-knuckle handling, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with the way they looked. And although the unfeasibly fast TSO mule I drove needed some fine-tuning, it had all the right ingredients.
Stelliga planned to sell 50 cars a year and slowly ramp up to 200 a year, running a tight model line-up. With his tightly focused business plan - ‘Anyone can build cars, it’s selling them that’s the important bit,’ - the future of Marcos looked relatively secure. But Stelliga and I were wrong. And we’re not alone. There’s deafening silence from TVR and Noble. I haven’t heard a peep from either Invicta or FBS. To be a low-volume car company in today’s consolidation-centric automotive arena, you either need to produce a perfectly engineered niche model at just the right price (Pagani Zonda, Caterham), or have the full weight of a global player behind you (Artega with Volkswagen, Lotus with Proton and Aerial with Honda).
