Top Gear’s Top 9: cars spawned by the Lotus Elise

It’s the year 2000. A new millennium that’ll be fuelled by the dotcom boom and wireless device connections named after a 10th Century Danish monarch (Bluetooth, kids, Bluetooth).

Lotus wants to prove it too is ready for The Future, so it dismantles the four-year-old Elise S1 and turns it into a sort of limited-edition track day insect. 

The 340R did away entirely with doors and roof, shifted to an open-wheel layout and weighed just 700kg. Only 340 were built, sold immediately to wealthy enthusiasts and collectors. As a skeletal sports car it’s been overshadowed by the constantly evolving Ariel Atom, but ask yourself: does this really look like a 21 year-old relic to you?

Imagine a worthy but fairly dull carmaker like Kia announcing it’d struck a deal to sell a rebadged McLaren Artura… except it had a seven-year warranty and cost as much to service as a Picanto. That’s how random the Vauxhall VX220 would’ve seemed back in 2000. 

It actually owes its existence to a mutual back-scratching deal. Vauxhall needed to smear some sporty pizzazz into its dreary line-up, and Lotus – as usual – had run out of money to develop a follow-up to the wonderful but ageing S1 Elise. 

American giant General Motors offered to pony up the pounds for Lotus to make a new-gen sports car, on the understanding the general could then borrow the result, slap on some new body panels wearing Opel or Vauxhall badges, and hey-presto, a new sports car faster than you can say ‘Zafira VXR’.

By using Astra engines instead of Lotus’s preferred MG and Toyota power, the VX220 wasn’t quite as light as its Elise cousin. However, it had deep pockets full of torque, it featured more equipment (well, a nice comfy airbag), and heck was it pretty. Even today, it’s a real looker. Back in 2003 the VX Turbo was Top Gear’s Car of the Year, in fact. We know a winner when we see one. 

Fairly obviously, Lotus wasn’t going to dream up a whole new platform when it decided to turn the frothy, fun Elise into a focused track day fiend. 

The earliest Exige began life with four-cylinder engines and really did look just like an Elise wearing a hard-top hat with a wing bolted on the back. 

When the Exige S3 blasted into view in 2011 it got bespoke styling, a Toyota V6 wedded to a supercharger and performance that’d give a Porsche 911 a right ol’ kick up the lederhosen. Even as it goes out of production this year, there’s nothing else that steers quite as beautifully as an Exige. Sob.

Easy to forget these days that Tesla’s story didn’t begin with the Model S saloon. The Californian upstart’s first production model was a two-seater sports car based on the Lotus Elise. Sort of…

Elon Musk has been at pains to point out the simple brainwave of taking a lightweight British roadster, stuffing the chasm where the engine once lived with batteries wired up to a RWD motor and having done with it… didn’t work out. 

Because of the sheer weight of over 800 laptop cells, the delicate Lotus suspension had to be re-engineered, then bolted to a stiffer chassis with a longer wheelbase. Then there was the refreshed interior and totally new bodywork. Even the light clusters and wheels were rehashed by Tesla. Only 6 per cent of Elise parts were shared unchanged, we’re told. Mainly the door mirrors. 

Good for 0-60 in under four seconds, Tesla’s first Roadster was the first EV capable of 200 miles on a charge, and at the time of writing is still the only sports car in outer space with a dummy inside wearing a spacesuit and David Bowie on the stereo. What a truly odd sentence. 

In truth, we could’ve filled this Elise-fest with cars Lotus itself morphed from its mid-engined baby. The Europa, the Evora, the 3-Eleven, and this: the 2-Eleven. This was Hethel’s 2007-spec crack at a hardcore track day motor. 

Apart from Elise headlights, there’s really not much left of the donor car to look at. With no doors, no roof, a supercharger as standard and road-legalisation on the options list, the 2-Eleven’s an S&M whipcrack at the likes of Caterham, Ariel and Radical. Whoo-pah.

Right folks, let’s get obscure. Heard the one about the American electric sports car related by birth to a Lotus Elise that’s not a Tesla? Thought not. 

At the 2009 Detroit motor show, Dodge revealed this orange wonder. Yep, Dodge. You know Dodge. Charger. Hellcat. Demon. 800bhp V8s. Wheelies. That’s right, Dodge. The obvious battery-powered lightweight two-seater guys. Duh.

The Circuit (good name) borrowed the body of Lotus’s Europa flop, which was basically a posh Elise with a dollop of soundproofing pretending to be an Audi TT rival. This was a clever choice because no-one had actually bought one, which meant everyone thought Dodge had drawn a brand-new car. Canny. 

Thanks to a 268bhp, 480lb ft motor the Circuit promised to be rapid, and offer between 150 and 200 miles between charges. It was heading for a production run in 2010, but the financial crisis killed the project off, and Dodge started fiddling with superchargers instead. Ah well…

And nope, that’s still not the end of the used-to-be-a-Lotus-but-now-wants-to-go-electric-in-America saga. How is this not a Netflix documentary already?

In 2016, an outfit called Detroit Electric announced that no, they weren’t responsible for the power cuts in Michigan, and yes, they were going to have a crack at bringing an electric Elise to market. It revived the name of a defunct American electric carmaker that’d flourished and folded before the Second World War, and the recipe was, let’s be honest, pretty predictable. 

In the middle, a 37kWh lithium battery. At the back, a 201bhp e-motor. Range? 180 miles. Recharge time? Four hours. And the fun bit: 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. Apparently it was going to have a four-speed manual gearbox and cost $135,000…

And then –  nothing. Reports suggest some £300 million of Chinese investment was sunk into the company to get Detroit Electric rolling in 2017, with (…start-up bingo cards at the ready…) a family-friendly electric SUV planned as a follow-up. How original.

So far it’s been ominous radio silence. With the Elise about to be killed off we do hope those investors kept their receipts handy.  

A white Lotus that can swim? Where have we heard that idea before?

This submarining Elise isn’t the work of MI6 and Q, but the fizzing nest of Swiss crazy that is Rinspeed. In 2008 it unveiled this passion project, which contained an electrified propulsion system driving two propellers and blower-jets when submerged, and spin the rear wheels up to 75mph on land. 

Occupants breathe via conventional scuba-diving oxygen tanks, and the attention to detail even included salt-proofing the interior so the sQuba can set sail on the seven seas. 

Only one was ever made, at a cost of some $1.5 million. Still cheaper than one of those 007-spec DB5s with make-believe machine guns. 

Have you been waiting for this one? Proof that America can do good things with the Elise besides fill it with batteries and wires. One John Hennessey was enterprising enough to fill it with good ol’fashioned horsepower instead. 

The story goes that the Texan tuner was idly wondering about the silliest car to slot his wildest 1000bhp+ LS7 engines into, and the Lotus Exige popped into his head as the ideal DNA-splicee. Thank goodness he’s a car bloke and not a farmer, or they’d have been eating lion-platypus burgers in Houston by now.

The Venom GT – spiritual ancestor of the more bespoke new Hennessy Venom F5 – cradled a 1,200bhp twin-turbo 7.0-litre V8 in its stretched chassis. Recorded topping out in excess of 270mph, this was Murica’s answer to the might of Bugatti and Koenigsegg in the v-max wars, and it owed its existence in part to a nippy little British roadster.