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Lotus reveals new lightweight chassis technology for new family of EVs greencarcongress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greencarcongress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lightweight chassis propels EV development at Lotus theengineer.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theengineer.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lotus Reveals New Electric Vehicle Architecture With Up to 872 HP roadandtrack.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from roadandtrack.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
There were two friends. One was a freelance car designer called Julian Thomson. The other, Richard Rackham, had a staff job at Lotus as a chassis designer. The fact that both men owned Ducati motorbikes perhaps wasn’t so remarkable. Neither was the fact that they owned them for precisely the same reason: not as modes of transport but as fine examples of kinetic art to be studied, understood, admired and, of course, ridden on great roads just for the hell of it. What arose from this set of circumstances, however, turned out to be a particularly serendipitous meeting of minds. When the time came for a chastened Lotus to truly reconnect with its core values after the clever but wrong-headed front-wheel-drive Elan bit the dust, inspiration sprang from the two designers’ shared appreciation for the pared-down beauty of an iconic Italian superbike. The project they were to work on was called M1-11; the car that emerged in 1996 was the Lotus Elise.
A quarter of a century is a long time in the world of motoring, the past 25 years seeing more technological developments with a switch towards electrification. Just ask Lotus – it knows exactly how far the industry has moved on, given that it’s working furtively on development of its 1,973bhp, £2million-plus all-electric hypercar, the Evija. And – shock horror – an SUV. But the manufacturer owes all that it is now to a car that’s celebrating its 25th birthday in 2020, a model that saved the British brand’s finances when it was close to extinction: the Elise. Lotus has arguably – and successfully – navigated more troubled waters recently when it comes to its financial health and its custodians, but in the mid-nineties it still wasn’t exactly flush, so the arrival of a small, lightweight two-seat roadster that stayed true to founder Colin Chapman’s principles was just what the brand needed.