Future of Lotus

[NedaSay]

25 minutes ago, C8RKH said:

So sat on Heathrow Express just now and news comes on. Ferrari reporting record revenues. All down to surge in sales of 8 and 12 cylinder models!

 

You know where you can stick your 4 pots! 

 

Hum let's be optimistic, first Lotus gets to fiddle with Geely's own V6 to get something positively perky about it lets say 550bhp, down the line Lotus gets Geely to bankroll a V8 block on which to  slot two banks of the Drive-E 4 cyl with the turbo and electric supercharger - 4L and some 800bhp on tap  - to which you had one or two electric motors to get to a ridiculous amount of bhp... considering they have a carbon chassis in development that should offset the lardyness of such a unit.  

[Bibs]

https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a24685707/geely-buys-miller-motorsports-park-utah

[Bentzion]

Big track....Bloody high desert!  Needs lots of money to make it look and feel attractive. 

I guess the Chinese may be able to pull it off...  

[C8RKH]

8 hours ago, NedaSay said:

Hum let's be optimistic, first Lotus gets to fiddle with Geely's own V6 to get something positively perky about it lets say 550bhp, down the line Lotus gets Geely to bankroll a V8 block on which to  slot two banks of the Drive-E 4 cyl with the turbo and electric supercharger - 4L and some 800bhp on tap  - to which you had one or two electric motors to get to a ridiculous amount of bhp... considering they have a carbon chassis in development that should offset the lardyness of such a unit.  

Lol, like it. 400, 450, 500, 550bhp - yeah that's plenty for any road car, especially a Lotus if they shave 100 kilo's off the weight of the current Evora for a similar sized new model.

The Evora is what around 1260kg right now in GT430 guise.  My understanding is that a lot of the "weight" is the Toyota V6 and supercharger which is not exactly the lightest engine of that dimension in the world. 163kg is I believe  the service weight of the 2GR-FE V6, so including the supercharger and chargecooler we must be looking at almost 200kgs, or one sixth of the total Evora weight.  Get a new lightweight V8, say 3.6/4.0ltr in there, even with 410/430 bhp which should be achievable easily for an NA and shed 60kg from the engine+supercharger+chrargecooler total of 200kg, get rid of some of the stupid +2 wasted space and shrink slightly the cars length, whilst mounting the engine lower (in what was the +2 area) and you probably have one hell of a superb, sweet handling, low centre of gravity, weapon!  I think that would be my perfect Evora and at £115k for the priviledge I'd be in.

Then, lengthen the wheelbase and either add 2 doors (a la AM Rapide) whilst keeping the svelte profile and you have the ideal family guy 911 killer.

I can dream. Oh please Geely, please make this car for me in Fire Red!

 

[silverfrost]

On 04/11/2018 at 23:22, Nathan Pitman said:

Sorry, pop up lights ain’t gonna happen. Pedestrian safety killed those off. 

Not 100 percent sure on this one,  it has been brought up in the past regarding the law on pop up lights,  Some say it was stopped due to aero reasons, others for as you say pedestrian safety,  

If rolls royce can design a safe flying lady, i am sure the boys at hethal can design safe pop up lights hopefully 

[C8RKH]

You can have pop up lights in the US market and EU market, it's a myth you can't.  The issue is how you handle the pedestrian impact and limit the risk of injury. As you say @silverfrost RR got around it with the silver lady which is covered by the same regulations.  You would need to have some sort of a "sudden drop" feature when a front end impact was detected and of course they would have to deform in to the body space easily so as not to impact on the crash box protection etc.

It is not impossible. just hard. And expensive. Which is why it has not been done and we have these stupid shape formed plastic headlights instead.

Imagine standing in front of your garage. Opening your electric door and then "plipping" your key fob or smart phone - the interior lights in the new Esprit come on, the headlights gracefully rise and flash "hello" at you, and the engine automatically sparks into life and engages its pre drive analytics to warm everything up for you.  The hairs on the back of your neck WOULD NEVER again be flat every time this happened. You'd be like a little kid wetting his pants each time it happened.  I'm in.

[silverfrost]

Sounds fantastic Andy,   I think a sound investment if they did get the pop up lights back on a modern Esprit,    Kills two birds with one stone,  first it is iconic of the Esprit design,  second it would also make the car even more unique with been the only car in production to have them.  

[Nathan Pitman]

First ever pop-ups back in 1936... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cord_810_1936.JPG

[LotusLeftLotusRight]

The Esprit engine has to be located longitudinally and mounted much lower in the chassis than the Evora/Exige. As said, the supercharger assembly itself is another big lump of high-up weight that competitors don't have to deal with. What happened to that Ferrari 458 V8 engined Evora development mule that someone on here knows the whereabouts of and teased us with photos? I presume that was located longitudinally, so it has already been done.

[davidradio]

I suspect that's a reasonable assumption! 

[NedaSay]

7 hours ago, C8RKH said:

Lol, like it. 400, 450, 500, 550bhp - yeah that's plenty for any road car, especially a Lotus if they shave 100 kilo's off the weight of the current Evora for a similar sized new model.

The Evora is what around 1260kg right now in GT430 guise.  My understanding is that a lot of the "weight" is the Toyota V6 and supercharger which is not exactly the lightest engine of that dimension in the world. 163kg is I believe  the service weight of the 2GR-FE V6, so including the supercharger and chargecooler we must be looking at almost 200kgs, or one sixth of the total Evora weight.  Get a new lightweight V8, say 3.6/4.0ltr in there, even with 410/430 bhp which should be achievable easily for an NA and shed 60kg from the engine+supercharger+chrargecooler total of 200kg, get rid of some of the stupid +2 wasted space and shrink slightly the cars length, whilst mounting the engine lower (in what was the +2 area) and you probably have one hell of a superb, sweet handling, low centre of gravity, weapon!  I think that would be my perfect Evora and at £115k for the priviledge I'd be in.

Then, lengthen the wheelbase and either add 2 doors (a la AM Rapide) whilst keeping the svelte profile and you have the ideal family guy 911 killer.

I can dream. Oh please Geely, please make this car for me in Fire Red!

 

Ok to be fair at 163 kg the GR-FE if not the ultimate lightweight V6 is by far and large not  lardy at all... There are kits out there with exotic material to get its weight way down I read somewhere that it could shave up to 15kg but that means a whole lot of titanium. the Lotus HWA V8 was going to be 170kg but that was pretty much a race engine detuned. A Drive-E based engine would be necessarily turboed as the entire architecture is turbo centric, with a max rpm output set at a low 6000 rpm  because the goal of that engine was to comply with Euro 6c and also gulp gas or diesel with minimal change to the engine block and head.

Now when it comes to the placement of said engine... Yup if we remove the leg room that was dedicated to the +2 configuration you can centre masses even more aggressively but you still need the space dedicated to the gas tank and you may want to make said gas tank a bit larger, a 70L capacity would be a minimum. Still as we said there's plenty of weight to be shed by doing a bit of reengineering to the Evora chassis: some alloy castings here and there instead of plain extrusions and doing away with anything steel on the car to lower mass even further.  Now when you say adding to doors (à la AM Rapide) do you mean having a four door, four seater rear mid engined sports car???  You lost me there. 

[C8RKH]

2 hours ago, NedaSay said:

Now when you say adding to doors (à la AM Rapide) do you mean having a four door, four seater rear mid engined sports car???  You lost me there. 

Yes, that's it. I'd call it more a kids car than a sports car. you know, somewhere to put the darling little shit machines and the nappy wagon in the boot..

The sports car would be for us men and women who leave the kids at home when we go vroom vroom.

[NedaSay]

Bring on the heavy machinery.

 

https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/unanimous-approval-for-lotus-expansion-plans-1-5769028

[silverfrost]

Fantastic news     Did they not apply a few years ago for some more buildings and it got turned down ? 

[Geoffers]

The free fact finding trip to China for the council bigwigs sealed it!🤑

[LotusLeftLotusRight]

Haha. Do you remember that story about the Phoenix Consortium who briefly owned failing Rover? They wanted to be saved by Shanghai Automotive, who invited them to China. They all had dinner together and the booze started flowing. The canny Chinese pretended to be drunk and let the stupid Brits get bladdered. Only then did they start negotiations.

[geartox]

After discussing with some dealers in France during the last few weeks, they tell me that the 430 releases of Evora and Exige should be the last version of these models. Time and money are spent now for the developpment of the new elise.

we will see.

 

 

 

[Sport220]

Great news! Bring on the Elise S4 😀

[scotty435]

This one didn’t look to bad to me.

[Corsu]

Our lead story this week is the exclusive news that Lotus has plans to launch a £2 million-plus electric hypercar with Bugatti Chiron-beating performance. Other models in the pipeline at the Norfolk-based manufacturer include the first Lotus SUV, and a replacement for the Evora sports car. 

 

[LotusLeftLotusRight]

Cool! Where's me chequebook?

[Nathan Pitman]

The halo car. 

[Jeanvm]

Hello?? plans to launch a £2 million-plus electric hypercar who's going to pay that? I have to rob a bank or become a friend of dubious men.

[C8RKH]

Well, theirs Halo and there's gond damn fooking unachievable unobtainimum!   

[Nathan Pitman]

If Lotus launched a truly new Elise, Exige, Evora and an SUV all at the same time, they still wouldn't generate as many front covers and headlines as a super crazy tech demonstration (with a very limited run), or as they are commonly known - Halo cars. It's not about the Halo car itself... they honestly couldn't care less if they sold any or not. It's all about generating a ton of brand interest/desire and that would trickle down to sales of their new more affordable models. That front cover alone is demonstration of that.