The Lotus Elise: a technological tour de force

Automotive Manufacturing & Production, March, 1997 by Gary S. Vasilash

Car magazine, a British publication, held its second annual Design and Technology Awards last October. The vehicle named "The Most Innovative New Car in Production": the Lotus Elise. It received the nod over the BMW 5-series, the Renault Scenic minivan, the Mercedes SLK, and the Porsche Boxster. The chassis and brakes on the Elise also picked up the "Best Innovation in Production Award." Meanwhile, in another section of the same issue of the magazine in which the awards are detailed (December '96), results of a road test of 20 different cars on a British race course are presented. The lineup includes the Lamborghini Diablo SV, the Porsche 911, the Honda NSX, and the Jaguar XK8 - many of your not-so-basic, stratospherically priced vehicles. The car that was judged to be the best-handling: the Lotus Elise. If the car was available in the U.S. - and it's not (no airbags) - the price would be on the order of $30,000 to $32,000.

Car magazine is not alone in hailing this vehicle, which is quite evidently a technological and driving tour de force from Lotus Cars Ltd. (Norwich, England), the company established in 1955 by racing great Colin Chapman. Chapman may have died comparatively young - in 1982 at age 54 - and the company he founded may now be owned by a Malaysian automaker, Proton (which acquired Lotus Group International on 30 October 1996), but his philosophy lives on at the car maker/consultancy. As Kenneth Sears, head of Vehicle Engineering, Lotus Engineering, Lotus Cars, puts it, "One of the things that people Identify with the company is gaining some performance advantage through the development of new technology. That's the constant theme of all Lotus cars. We've always come out with performance in a vehicle sector, and that's been associated with new technology." That's the strategic approach taken. On a more tactical level, there's this from Tim Holland, the executive engineer at Lotus Engineering's Detroit office (Walled Lake, MI): Lotus' philosophy for years has been to make each component do as many tasks as possible. Every design feature has to carry out as many functions as possible."

The Car Makers' Engineer. There are a few things that are useful to know about Lotus before getting into the Elise. First off, it is a company that is primarily an aid to other auto manufacturers. Each year, some 500,000 vehicles are produced with Lotus-designed engines (sometimes credited, sometimes not). In all, about one million vehicles per year are produced that are equipped with Lotus-designed systems; the company is especially noted for its suspension work. On the engineering side of the business, which represents about 80% of the firm's revenue, approximately 800 people do the contract engineering and development. On the car-making side, there are 300 people. Engineers are assigned to the car side for a finite period of time: they do their jobs and then get back to contract engineering. In the case of the Elise, the whole project went rather quickly: from clean sheet to production in 27 months. That timing was not a fluke. According to Sears: "We've always been able to do very short programs because we work with lean teams and highly motivated people. We've got fast response throughout the whole company." Lotus engineers also fully developed the Lotus Type 918 V8 engine, which was introduced in March, 1996, in 27 months. It is the first new Lotus engine since 1972 - and it is anticipated that the engine will have a product life of 20 years. Still, of the Elise, Sears says, "This particular car is the most-efficient design program we've ever undertaken."

Getting the Right Price & Performance. One of the primary objectives of the Elise program was not just to make a high-performance vehicle, but to make one that was affordable. This had two ramifications. One was that the performance was not going to be achieved through the use of a powerful engine. In fact, the engine that powers the Elise isn't actually built by Lotus: it's a 1,796-cc, 118-hp four-cylinder Rover K-series engine. So this means that key to achieving performance would be through the production of a light-weight vehicle. Still, there is the over-riding caveat: "From a business point of view," Sears says, "it needed to be a low-investment program."

First off, there's the body. Lotus has been using glass-reinforced composites for body structures since 1957, so there is extensive in-house familiarity with the material. Holland points out that whereas some people might assume that the rationalization for the use of plastic body panels goes to the point of achieving low mass, that's not it: "If you made an Elise out of steel, there wouldn't be much in it. The advantage of the material to a company like Lotus, which is quite small, is in the investment cost." The company produces soft tools - plastic-faced tooling - which allow the economical, though slow, production of body panels. Given that initial plans called for the production of just 700 Elises per year (a number which has been pushed up to 2,500 because there is a year's waiting list that involves a non-refundable deposit: this car is sought!), the slow rate is not a problem.