jonwat

Electric cars release more toxic emissions than petrol-powered vehicles

If the metal pipe fitted at the factory isn't corroded then leave it in place.

Lotus stuck the Emeya in a freezer at -35°C

Pistonheads

I wish I was clever enough to think of this

Pistonheads

Top Gear, fourth one down

Lotus EV division valued at $5.5bn in public listing

Check out this, if the problem is the gears there's a repair kit

Bangers and Cash new series 🤑

As they say at McLaren "My daily driver is a Lotus (Cortina)"

Lotus wants its future sports cars to drive themselves

Jay Leno has always been an Elan fan

Cats didn't come in until 1991 🤔

Today's Sunday Times classic cars: No carmarker could come up with anything to rival this lively roadster Paul Newman raced his. Britt Ekland and husband Peter Sellers buzzed around Mayfair in theirs, and Diana Rigg, as Emma Peel in The Avengers (the TV series, not the Marvel superheroes) outran baddies in hers. The Lotus Elan was the fab sports car of the Swinging Sixties. Other carmakers tried but none could rival the genius of Ron Hickman OBE, a South Africa-born inventor who turned the idea of a basic two seater with engine at the front and rear-wheel drive into a lively – hence Elan – roadster whose design inspired the Mazda MX5. The Elan was an example of the mantra expounded by Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus, that weight begets weight — the heavier the car, the bigger the engine required. His solution: “simplify, then add lightness”. The Elan’s fibreglass body helped it tip the scales at a mere 640kg — about a tonne less than a modern two-seater such as the BMW Z4. Pop-up headlamps, also copied by Mazda, gave the car — which cost £1,317 in 1963 — a sleek and expensive look; and a range of exciting colours including Carnival Red, Pistachio Lime Green and Lotus Yellow ensured it stood out in Britain’s sepia city streets. It had no power steering but was light enough not to need it; the supercar designer Gordon Murray expressed disappointment that his £540,000 McLaren F1 didn’t steer the way the Elan did. Car wags joked that Lotus meant Lots of Trouble, Usually Serious, though problems under the bonnet were often blamed on the Ford (Fix Or Repair Daily) engine. For all its foibles, the Elan stayed in production with various derivatives, including hardtops, a four-seater – the Elan +2 – and a delightful two-tone Sprint, for 13 years until 1975; during which production shifted from Cheshunt, Hertfordshire to Hethel, Norfolk. The Serious Trouble generally happened if you crashed or rolled it. The fibreglass body, which was also prone to cracking, offered little protection. The Beatles’ song, A Day in the Life, included the lines, “He blew his mind out in a car/ He didn’t notice that the lights had changed.” It was written after the death in 1966 of Tara Browne, a friend of Sir Paul McCartney and an heir to the Guinness fortune, who died after driving his Elan at high speed through a red light in London’s South Kensington and colliding with a parked lorry. Lotus revived the Elan name in 1989 with a different, front-wheel drive model it hoped would rekindle the Chapman-era magic. The company was eventually taken over in 2017 by the Chinese conglomerate Geely. Expect to pay between about £15,000 and £65,000 for an early Elan, depending on condition — a bit extra for two-tone.

Autocar

Take a look here

Over fourty years old & still looks the mut's nuts 😀

Slightly off topic but the Sunday Times reports McLaren are struggling: McLaren has received a £30 million injection from its Bahraini owners as the British supercar-maker struggles to secure its long-term future Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, Mumtalakat, invested fresh capital last week — just two months after pumping £80 million into the group. The new funds take the total injected by shareholders to nearly £500 million over the past year. Woking-based McLaren, which owns a 70.25 per cent stake in the Formula One team of the same name, has hired financial advisers from Teneo to advise on its capital structure to avoid repeated top-ups from Mumtalakat, according to City It is understood that McLaren will use some of the £30 million of fresh capital to develop new products. Paul Walsh, the former chief executive of drinks giant Diageo, was hired as McLaren executive chairman in March 2020 when Mumtalakat led a £300 million equity injection — separate from the funds put in over the past year — to support the company’s “long-term strategy” at the time. But the business has suffered a number of false dawns since, forcing the board to go cap-in-hand to investors on several occasions. Like many of its competitors, McLaren was hit by global shortages of computer chips. Auditors warned in September that McLaren was facing material uncertainty over its ability to continue trading for the next 12 months. A spokesman for McLaren said that last week’s £30 million funding was “part of an ongoing recapitalisation process to support McLaren’s product development strategy”.

Typical of lazy Times journalism, not what it used to be.

Article in today's Times but its behind a paywall.

Or perhaps not

to arrive in 2027 at £75,000

Eletre S review

What is it like to live with an electric car?