The 2010 Paris Auto Show will live on in the memory of car enthusiasts as the venue where Lotus unveiled six all-new concepts, including five sports cars.
With Dany Bahar at the helm (who has since gone on to form Ares Design), Lotus was keen to establish itself as a force in the performance car market but it wasn’t long before each of the six cars was killed off. Of the new models, a new-age Lotus Esprit was the closest to becoming a reality, Evo now reports.
When unveiled in Paris, the Esprit concept was equipped with a Lexus 5.0-liter V8 with a claimed 620 hp. However, not long after the show, Bahar decided Lotus should make its own engine.
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Lotus engineers got to work and developed a V8 that pumped out 570 hp and featured a kinetic energy recovery system (KERS) just like Formula 1 cars of the day. While the British automaker’s in-house V8 didn’t have as much power as the Lexus engine, it was apparently 80 kg lighter and 40 per cent smaller.
Work on the engine progressed to the point where Lotus had run it on a dyno and slotted it into a Ferrari 458 Italia it was using as a test car. The automaker continued to develop the V8 after Bahar’s spectacular departure from the company in 2012 and it wasn’t until 2014 that the Esprit project was officially killed off by then-CEO Jean-Marc Gales.
When it is a shame that neither the V8 hybrid nor the new Esprit reached production, Lotus still has an exciting future ahead of it with the all-electric Evija and the recently unveiled Emira.
