Lotus pulled a PR coup at the Paris Auto Show this week with a stunning unveiling of 5 entirely new models! All this with no warning to the press or months of hype preceding it. First, I gotta give a hat tip to their PR folks, because that was such a refreshing return to the old days when an unveiling really was an unveiling!
As a lifelong fan of this unique British marque, I am pleased to see a robust set of brand new offerings from them. Although Lotus was historically mainly a maker of small volume sports cars, founder Colin Chapman definitely sought to offer a full line of sports and GT cars, but never quite managed to acheive that goal before his untimely death. His devotion to and fixation upon motor racing was a huge distraction from his production cars and they were always short on capital, so there has never been a time in the history of the company when they have had a well-coordinated line of brand new offerings all at once like this. In that respect, I think Colin would be proud of this launch.
Also, none of these cars is ugly, let me say. I happen to think each on is quite nice by itself, though the Elise is a disappointment. The proportions are all good, and there are some really cool idiosyncratic details that belong on a Lotus, like the strange tail light treatment on the Eterne, for example. The Elan and the Esprit have the cleanest, most purposeful look, but the Eterne and Elite have some very nice GT proportions as well. There is a good "family look" to the line, but I have to admit that they all look almost too similar. I have a hard time telling the differnce between the Eterne and the Elite front views, for example. Furthermore, all of these cars look less like Loti to me than what a frustrated Hyundai designer might draw at home in his spare time, wishing his boss would listen to him. There is something unmistakably Asian about these cars, and they definitely fall into some of the same form and surfacing tricks employed at Toyota and Honda of late.
Yet for those critical of the styling, what should Lotus' new owners have done? Lotus has always been a forward looking company, and any retro touches would have been totally inappropriate. (The L O T U S lettering on the trunk lid of the Elite and Eterne is a wonderful subtle nod to the Europa, though!) Furthermore, there has never been a singular Lotus look. With few exceptions, every Lotus road car has had a fairly individual look and style to it. Lotus under Colin Chapman was always innovative mechanically, but styling-wise followed whatever the prevailing aesthetic current of the time was. The original Seven, Elite, Elan, and Esprit look nothing like each other, but each epitomizes the look of the time in which it was designed. In other words, there is no telltale family gene to draw upon, even in the slightest.
The only commonality amongst all the original cars was the ingenuity of Colin Chapman's brilliant chassis design, clever use of advanced materials, and the adherence to his "Add Lightness" philosophy. Even most of the recent post-Chapman Loti such as the Elise and Exige have adhered piously to the way Colin thought about sports cars. This is the point where I might say that the new company has now diverged from its founder's vision. These new cars offer little in the way of unique technical design. Surely they will perform to a high level, but at about twice the curb weight and twice the horsepower that Colin would have deemed necessary, and without any unusual or even bizarre tricks that Colin tried. I suppose the need to become a full-line volume manufacturer causes some compromises, but Colin Chapman was rarely if ever one to compromise his engineering philosophy. What do you all think? Would Colin approve??
Photos via Autoblog
Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 7:40PM