Lotus is turning back into the icon it once was. Do you think it was a good move to drop Lotus right when things were starting to get really good? Come to think of it, GM likes to do this. (Allante, Reatta, Fiero, Cimmeron ) Ford has a whole bunch of lines, some killing it for cash, but do you feel that GM should have keep the Lotus division?

 

GM dropped Lotus after the Elan fiasco. The big tragedy there was GM's meddling. Before GM bought Lotus - already in trouble since death of Colin Chapman - the M100/Elan was going to be based on Toyota mechanicals. (RWD, DOHC 16v from the Corolla GTS, etc.) GM forced the idea of Isuzu drivetrains and the switch to FWD.

The Elan was a disaster in the United States. Too expensive, too late and too slow were the reasons. However, once GM sold out to Romano Artoli (the guy who owned Bugatti), the Elan Series 2 became a reasonable success. How can you go wrong making a car with free left-over engines and paid-off tooling. Artoli even financed the Elise, named after his daughter, by selling the Elan's tooling to Kia.

Okay, we all know that Bugatti went bust, Artoli sold to the Malaysians, and the Esprit hasn't been replaced. Could GM have done a better job with Lotus. Absolutely!

GM killed the LT-5 engined Esprit. A "ZR-1" Esprit would have been the ultimate supercar of the era, with top-notch mechanicals and far more prestige than the 4-banger turbo. Sadly, GM backed out and the LT-5 production line ground to a halt.

Lotus eventually made the twin-turbo 3.5 liter V8, but the output wasn't very impressive. Neither was the sound, since they made the mistake of using a flat-plane crank. An upsized Esprit replacement, either the Renault engined M250 or V8-engined flagship, would have been great. Now, all we have is the Elise...

...with a Toyota engine.

It's almost as if GM had never bought Lotus in the first place. Talk about history repeating.