Lotus open to selling tooling for Elise sports car

LONDON -- Lotus is open to selling the tooling for its outgoing Elise sports car, the automaker's managing director Matt Windle said.

The two-seat Elise has been sold for 25 years and is regarded as one of Lotus's finest ever sports cars for its light weight, nimble handling and good looks.

"If the right project and the right partner came along, I do not see why not. It's a wonderful car," Windle told Automotive News Europe.

The Elise goes out of production this year along with the more expensive Exige and Evora sports cars to make way for the new Emira coupe, which debuts in July.

Lotus sold the tooling to its first sports car, the Seven, to British company Caterham in 1973. Caterham still builds a version of the car today.

Windle worked for Caterham for two years from 2012 as a chief body engineer before moving to another niche sports-car maker, Zenos, and on to Lotus in 2017. He became Lotus Cars managing director in January.

Caterham was bought in April by Japanese importer and distributor VT Holdings, which sells Lotus cars.

Windle would not say whether Lotus was in talks with Caterham to buy the Elise. "I think they are just trying to sort out what their plans are going forward," he said.

Another possible buyer for the Elise is newly revived British coachbuilder Radford, which on Wednesday announced it had agreed a deal with Lotus to help it launch a new retro-inspired sports car. Radford is most famous for modifying Minis in the 1960s.

Ex Formula One driver Jenson Button, one of the founders of the revived company, tweeted on Wednesday that the car will be "inspired by a British sports car from the 1960s," without giving more information. Ant Anstead, another founder, tweeted that it would be a tribute to the Lotus Type 62 racing coupe.

Windle said Lotus had discussed keeping the Elise before deciding to move on.

"We did deliberate around this a long time," he said. "The truth is that the whole of the manufacturing facility at Hethel [Lotus's factory in England] is being transformed into an automated process. We just did not have the room to produce the Elise."

The Elise was unveiled at the 1995 Frankfurt auto show and named after the granddaughter of the then Lotus Chairman Romano Artioli. The car's bonded aluminum platform kept weight low, creating a car that was fun to drive, despite being powered by a small 118 hp Rover-sourced four-cylinder engine.

Production targets were quickly raised from 800 to 2,500 a year on customer demand and it went on to sell around 12,000 cars in five years, according to Lotus data.

The car received a facelift in 2001, but since then, updates have mainly been focused on raising power and improving handling.

The final entry-level Elise offers double the original car's power at 240 hp.