The new Lotus Esprit - getting ready for Paris?
Lotus are promising the “…evolution of an icon” at the Paris Motor Show. Are we finally about to get the new Lotus Esprit?
The truth is we don’t actually know. As far as a new Lotus Esprit goes, we’re pretty sure Lotus signed the Esprit off for production late last year after the Evora – which needed to succeed to allow the Esprit to live again – exceeded all Lotus’ expectations. But Lotus have never confirmed the Esprit is ready to rock ‘n’ roll.
What we have had this morning is a missive from Lotus proclaiming “…the future evolution of an iconic brand [Lotus] will be at the Paris Motor Show.” Which gives several months of hinting and tease playing to ‘entertain’ us in the meantime.
But there are other possibilities apart from the new Lotus Esprit. We could be getting the launch of the supercharged Evora or even the Evora Convertible. It is just possible that we might get a replacement for the Elise – which is rather long in the tooth – although we just had an Elise facelift revealed back in February.
There is one last possibility – new engines for the Elise. Those Lotus currently use – all from Toyota – are rather long in the tooth, so we could be seeing new, more powerful and more economic engines to bolster the ageing Elise and Exige.
But we’d rather believe the 2012 Lotus Esprit is upon us. The halo car should get the V10 from the Lexus LF-A, but other models could use the V8 out of the IS-F with 420bhp and an entry level Esprit with the 300bhp V6 from the Evora. And following on we should even get a Lotus Esprit Convertible.
Don’t know about you, but we definitely prefer expecting the new Esprit to a new engine for the Elise. And with former Ferrari man Danny Bahar now at the helm, we think he’d rather see the new Lotus Esprit debuting than anything else.
We’ll see.
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