[members] Fw: [ELCC] Lotus cars and other related things...

[Mark Velky]

CLNW Member
 
    Passing it along.
 
Mark
 
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Douglas Jackson <douglasejackson at hotmail.com>
To: ELCC Members <elcc_org at googlegroups.com> 
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2012 1:25 PM
Subject: [ELCC] Lotus cars and other related things...
  

 
Hello:

I was just looking through a few old magazines that I found in my basement the other day and came across a thing called "World News" in the May 20, 1996 issue of Autoweek and right there it said that Lotus was "down-sizing" their Lotus USA staff in Lawrenceville, Goeogia from 12 people to 6. They quoted a Lotus USA spokesperson as saying that they probably didn't need 12 people to help import and arrange the sales of just a few cars each year... they'd sold 153 cars in 1995. 

The receptionist at the office had apparently left simply because there wasn't anything to do!

Apparently at that time there were 60 four cylinder Turbo Esprits unsold at US dealerships. The article also said that Lotus USA was sending 16 of the four cylinder cars back to England, supposedly because Lotus was almost ready to export the brand new V8 powered Esprits.

Another person with Lotus USA said they plan to sell 50 of the V8 Esprits during the last half of 1996 and then (hopefully) sell 200 in 1997.

As of the date of the article, Group Lotus was still owned by the creditors of Bugatti financier Romano Artioli and it was suggested that as soon as these assets are sold, things could return to "normal", whatever that meant (means)... so that's why the ELCC has a model of a Bugatti floating around the Holiday Party as a "mystery gift".

Another interesting thing for those of you who have wondered why all of the road-going Lotus cars name's start with E, at least we know where the name for the Elise comes from... it was the name of Romano Artioli's grand daughter! 

And, there was another rumor about the Elise being imported into this country with a Rover KV6 in the engine compartment and a spokesman for Lotus USA said there were "... definitely plans to get that car over here".

There was also a brief article that mentioned that Lotus, Morgan, Caterham, Aston Martin and McLaren were getting together as a group (called the Coalition of Small Volume Automobile Manufacturers) to petition the US to see if they could get us to relax our federal regulations on some safety, emission and product liability rules to make it easier to import their cars into this country. This brief article was accompanied by a picture of the interesting looking Caterham 21... did they ever produce these cars and has anybody ever seen one?

All very interesting in hindsight.

Doug Jackson


 
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