Lotus maps out future, again
Newswheel staff :: 23 June 2006 :: Filed under Coupe, Front engine sportscar, Mid / rear engine sportscar, Lotus, Lotus Elise, Europe & UK, US
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Five-year plan, anyone?
Not another five-year plan, surely? What with the Stalinist connotations and Lotus’s track-record for the unceremonious defenestration of said far-reaching future formulations, you might expect the Hethel-based sports car maker to steer well clear. Nope. This week’s Autocar Magazine has an interview with new Lotus CEO Mike Kimberley (if the name is familiar the reason is simple: this is Kimberly’s second innings at the helm of Lotus) in which the company’s new model roadmap is divulged in (not a great deal of) detail…
Rum renderings: Speculative Esprit sketch on this week’s cover of Autocar
Heading up Lotus’s new model army is a reborn Esprit. Kimberly has committed Lotus to launching the flagship mid-engined model in 2007 - but not to the Esprit name itself. It might go under another moniker beginning with ‘E’. He also refuses to come clean on the manufacturer supplying the car’s V8 engine, though the current weight of opinion, both on the web and in print, clearly rests on a BMW unit. The car is thought to be based on an extended variant of the Elise’s extruded / bonded aluminium chassis. Autocar estimates that between 1,000 to 2,000 examples could roll out of Hethel annually.
Europa GT: The first in a new line of more mature Elise derivatives
Next up are a number of ‘lifestyle’ orientated Elise derivatives. Making the Elise “a bit easier to live with for people who buy Porsche Boxsters and Audi TTs” is Kimberly’s professed aim. The recently-revealed Europa GT car is the first step in that direction.
Further out, Kimberly hints that a reborn Excel could be on the cards. Autocar has a detailed rendering of a front-engined sports car with a 2+2 seating config and a £35k estimated price point. However, Kimberly says Lotus has yet to design the car or even give it approval for production. It’s not expected to hit the road before 2009.
But what of the likelihood that this particular five-year formulation will actually stick? Well, were we to suggest that “this time” Lotus has solid backing and secure finances courtesy of Malaysian parent company Proton we might forgive the odd rolling eyeball. After all, isn’t that precisely what both GM and Bugatti ownership were supposed to deliver?
Linkage:
Autocar Mag
Posted 16 January 2007, by Oliver.T
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