AUTOCAR ARTICLE

General General Lotus Talk
1

Assume most have seen article in today’s Autocar forecasting Toyota engines in Elise and re-released Exige in 2004. V6 220hp and 1.8 4cyl 190hp will also allow entry into US market. All seems to make perfect sense and let’s hope it happens ASAP!

2

Sounds like good news for the future, seems to back up previous Autoexpress article (or lifted from it) - photo showing V6 seems rather inconclusive tho’!. Was chatting with a Lotus Engineer some months ago and he reckoned it would be v. difficult to make limited edition runs of S2 Elise, such as Exige, etc - something to do with the bodywork tooling/moulds being made difficult/expensive to adapt?

3

If you look closely at the picture it shows a line of duct tape over the centre line of the rear ‘butresses’ where they have obviously been cut. Looks as if the Exige type roof and engine cover is being considered. My preference would be for the Exige engine cover combined with the later Elise Mk2 ‘short’ hardtop so you could run the car open. Lets hope the Lotus design team check this site out occaisionaly!

4

Yep, a targa top would be tasty option especially if like me no air con fitted. Altho’ looking on bright side may lose the odd stone or two next summer.

5

I was at the factory when that car was runing (picking up my new car from motorsport!). I saw it up close when it came in, the tape on the butresses was just holding electrical wire in place(probebly monitoring somthing in the engine as the wires probebly led to what looked like a lap top inside the car?), as for engine identity, i dont know but you couldnt miss the single exhaust and i noticed a power bulge on each of the access panels at the front, also the engine was unbelivably queit!, you also have to bare in mind that lotus have been evaluating lots of different engines for years in there product and this car might not mean anything? but what i do know is that there hav’nt been as many people buying them since these rumors of a new elise started and imagine how i felt when i picked up �40,000.00+ of motorsport elise 190 only to find out later that the toyota 190bhp engine might be the standard engine in the elise mk111 (doh!!), but these fealing’s are long gone now and i’m enjoying my car to the full.

6

I’m not sure another Exige would make a lot of sense to them financially. Surely the M250 made much more sense and look what happened to that! I’m not also not sure if Lotus have ever hit a timescale (especially in this day and age of Euro regs) so I wouldn’t hold my breath for 2004 (which would naturally be silly and rather dangerous anyway! [image]http://www.exiges.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/grin.gif[/image] ).Ian [image]http://www.exiges.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif[/image]