Lotus are planning to update the Lotus Exige for 2011 and give the Lotus Evora a more upmarket cabin for the 2012 MY.
With all the hype that surrounded the recent Lotus outing at the Paris Motor Show it would be quite easy to forget that Lotus already has a range of cars to sell. But all the talk of hypercars and supercar saloons and the plan to become the Aston Martin of East Anglia are just that at the moment – talk.
Away from the big ideas, Lotus still has to shift its current model lineup until they find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that will allow them to morph in to Dany Bahar’s wet dream. So they have plans to update the Lotus Exige and titivate the Lotus Evora.
It seems an updated 2011 Lotus Exige may well be on the cards for the Geneva Motor Show in March. No details so far, but if the last Lotus update – to the Lotus Elise for the 2010 MY – is anything to go by we can probably expect less performance, not more, and a touch of the Lotus Evoras grafted on to the nose.
The changes planned for the 2012 Lotus Evora (and probably due to be shown at the Frankfurt Motor Show in the Autumn) are easier to define – up the quality stakes.
The Lotus Evora – despite some decent reviews when it came out – is a bit on the kit-car side (certainly the interior) for something that costs the best part of £50k. At that level you have the choice of some very decent transport from the Germans that doesn’t feel as if a man in a shed with a pot of glue has cobbled the interior together by candlelight.
So the plan seems to be to push the Evora’s quality upmarket, and Lotus has hired the services of German firm CSI to bolt the Evora’s interior together. As CSI are currently responsible for such interiors as the Audi R8, Porsche Panamera and Mercedes SLS, there seems a fair chance they’ll get something worth having.
There. That was nice. A Lotus story with a realistic plan.
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