Lotus Cars
Lotus Cars is a British manufacturer of sports and racing cars of light weight and fine handling. It also owns the Lotus Engineering consultancy, which maintains facilities in the UK, USA, China, and Malaysia.
Colin Chapman, a graduate of University College, London, formed the company as Lotus Engineering Limited in 1952. Since 1966 the company has operated from a modern factory and road test facility at Hethel near Wymondham, Norfolk, a former Royal Air Force base. The test track uses sections of the old runway.
By 1980, Lotus was in serious financial trouble with annual production down from 1,200 to only 383. The world was in an economic recession, sales in the key American market had collapsed, there had been no redesign or replacement of the original models, and customers saw the cars as outdated and undesirable.
In 1982, Chapman made a deal with Toyota for an exchange of intellectual property and expertise. Lotus Engineering helped Toyota to develop the Mk2 Supra, and Lotus launched the new Excel to replace the aging Eclat model. Use of Toyota chassis components reduced Excel production costs to less than for the Eclat.
Chapman died in 1982 at the age of 54. At the time of his death, he had built tens of thousands of successful racing and road cars and won the Formula 1 Constructors World Championship seven times. The company entered Formula 1 through its affiliate Team Lotus in 1958. A Lotus Formula One car driven by Stirling Moss won the brand’s first Grand Prix in 1960 at Monaco in a Lotus 18.
While manufacturers of heavy cars suffered during the gas crisis of the 1970s, Lotus stuck to its lightweight formula. The Elan produced from 1962 to 1974 was the first Lotus road car to use a steel backbone chassis with a glass-fiber body. Light weight, all-independent suspension, and fast rack-and-pinion steering made the Elan the standard for sports car handling in its time.
A new wedge-shaped version of the Elite came out in 1974 as a four-seater with all-wheel independent suspension and the Lotus 907 dual-overhead cam, four-cylinder, 16-valve, all-alloy engine that displaced 1973 cubic centimeters and developed approximately 144 horsepower, the first four-valve-per-cylinder production engine on the open market.
The angular and instantly recognizable Esprit appeared in 1975 with the same 907 engine turbocharged in later Esprits. An Esprit submarine appeared in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. The Esprit remained in production until 2004, after 1997 with a compact yet powerful eight-cylinder, 3500-cubic centimeter, turbo engine. This car attains 60 miles per hour in just over four seconds and a top speed of 180.
The Lotus Excel 2+2 made its debut in 1982, and the next year Toyota bought into the company. Then in 1986, General Motors bought the whole outfit outright, creating Lotus Cars USA in 1987, then sold it in 1993 to Bugatti, which dumped it on a the Malaysian firm Proton in 1996.
Bugatti sold the year before Lotus began to build the super light and fast Elise that proved so popular that annual production increased from 800 to 2500. The Elise wasn’t available in the USA until 2004, the same year the Exige hardtop arrived.
Current Lotus models:
The Elise incorporates an aluminum extrusion frame and a composite body shell. At 1,986 pounds with 345 horsepower, the supercharged Lotus Elise S is a strong performer: 0–60 acceleration is in 4.3 seconds
The Evora launched in July 2008 as a 2+2 (small rear seats) sports car with a mid-mounted, transverse, six-cylinder, 3500-cubic centimeter engine.
The Exige S, which Lotus introduced at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show, “represents the very essence of Lotus,” according to company promotional literature.
The 2-Eleven weighs just 1,500 pounds and with its 252 horsepower can go from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds and reach a top speed of 155.
Visit the Lotus website: www.lotuscars.com/ca/home
