upmarket to take on Porsche, Ferrari and Aston Martin as part of what it is calling "the dawn of a new era". The radical restructuring includes dropping founder Colin Chapman's 'lightweight and simple' ethos for all new cars, instead using more complex, more expensive and more upmarket manufacturing techniques.
Chapman probably choked on his Argentine beer when he read this... The new cars will be much heavier because of the added weight of all of those buzzwords. "The average car will cost £80,000-£110,000, the prices being justified by the use of technology including seven-speed twin clutch
transmissions, active aerodynamics, continuously variable dampers, hybrid and range extender systems, heads up displays, and the option of more alternatively-fuelled variants." Working in the software industry, I found that the best way to kill a company is to let Marketing control development.
Very scary idea (if one cares about the long term existence of Lotus) but was rather inevitable after the head honcho hired more and more of his former cohorts at Ferrari. I think Lotus needs to be able to sell their cars for more since due to low volume the production costs are most likely higher. Seems to me you can still produce and sell a reasonable lightweight and nimble car with reasonable luxury without ending up with a heavy, complex vehicle. i don't deny there is a great thrill to be had to drive a car with lots of hp and torque. On the other hand, most of that is unusable 99.9% of the time.
One of my favorite lotus cars is the Seven America version that was built to meet SCCA class standards. Not very powerful and ultimately not that fast but a perfect match of components that gives good acceleration and an incredible sense of speed, along with tremendous agility. true fun that can be enjoyed most of the time (of course i wouldn't mind driving one of Caterham's fire breathing monsters on occasion!!).
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