Lotus recently has made a bang during the Paris Motor Show last month early this month has recently announced its engineering plan on how it’s going to manufacture its all new range of cars. According to Lotus Engineering chief, Wolf Zimmerman, for the next 5 models that going to come out from Hethel plant will use rivet bonded aluminium spaceframes and part-stressed aluminium skins in order to raise its quality to the standars set by other supercar makers such as Ferrari, Aston Martin and Lamborghini.
Zimmerman which use to be a board director at AMG left for Lotus about a month ago said that the exterior finish and interior quality will be improve significantly compared to the current model as Lotus will start to play with other big and well establish boys. Besides the sports car, the new city car concept will also play a vital role in the Lotus transformation plan as it will embark to a more greener car which is essentially a regulation set by the EU community to have a lower Co2 emission thus the need to have a high end, urban commuter car is very essential as the car will fight with the same category as the Aston Martin Cygnet.
In order to achieved such lower Co2 emission, Lotus has a very monumental task ahead of them as the company needs to be in line with other car makers which in recent years seen a drastically reduce its carbon emission in order to meet the much tougher emission standard set by the EU community. Zimmerman also revealed that, although the V6 and V8 engines will be sourced from Toyota, the Elise model will have a new engine which is a force fed 2.0 litre that will not be source from Toyota.
I wonder which engine manufacturer Lotus will use for its new Lotus Elise. Smells like the marriage between Proton and Mitsubishi might be extended to this project since Mitsubishi has a force fed engine for its Mitsubishi Evo X. Only time will tell what’s the actual outcome.
source: Autocar
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