This Is What A Lotus 4-Door Sedan From 1987 Could Have Looked Like

“What does your car do?” The question was put to me by a friend’s four-year-old son, who was clearly struck by some sense of purpose the car managed to impart to his newly car-observant eyes in a way my adult peepers could not appreciate. Indeed, I don’t even remember the car in question – only the question itself.

I wasn’t sure how to answer, but I realized the question was not childish at all, but rather an important one. What the toddler wanted to know was if this machine was made for going off-road, or to perform like a sports car, or swaddle its occupants in luxury, or perform some other role only a four-year-old would imagine.

I’m not sure how I replied, but if you’re a car company you sure as hell should have an answer to such a query. If the car you’re putting before consumers doesn’t clearly register as sporting, or luxurious, or rugged, or sensible, or some other resonant adjective that allows potential buyers to quickly appreciate that the machine aligns with their wants and needs, it just isn’t going to find buyers.

If I had been standing next to a Lotus from years past, I could have answered the kid immediately. “This is the ultimate car for driving enjoyment. It’s meant for someone who wants to experience a car that satisfies with precision and handling. If you want a car just to be seen in, or heard, this is not the car for you.”

The kid would likely have just given me a perplexed look, being four and all, but that’s a pure mission statement there. The question is, could Lotus have applied that mission to sedans and been better known as a brand that made more than two-seat sports cars? Yes, and I wish Lotus had done more back in the day. Let’s see what might have happened if the brand did just that.

With the impending launch of the Emeya and Eletra, some might be disappointed to see the Lotus of today ostensibly attempting to become more of a status symbol brand and expanding into things beyond sports cars, but when even Ferrari is about to make an SUV you know that such a turn is inevitable. Also, it’s not an entirely new territory for the brand. While known for their sports and competition cars, the late founder Colin Chapman was not one to ignore a lucrative market. After creating the stretched wheelbase Elan +2 with a rear seat, he launched two sport/luxury cars in the early seventies that were quite different from anything available at the time. The sort-of-funeral-coach-looking Elite (Type 75) was paired with the fastback Eclat, both full four-seater machines that offered comfort with road manners that really no other GT car of the time could match.

The Eclat had a lid over an enclosed trunk; the Elite appeared to be a shooting brake but there was, in fact, a second fixed back window in place and the vertical gas tank behind the seats. This seems like a strange solution, and designer Ollie Winterbottom passed away not too long ago so it’s not like I can ask him.

Former managing director Mike Kimberly was at Lotus at the time; he was arguably the primary person who kept the company alive after Chapman’s death and spent much of his career at the firm, retiring as CEO in 2009. He’s on LinkedIn, but it’s not like I can DM a person to whom I’m not connected with a random question, saying that I contribute to a website run by a guy who eats spaghetti in the shower, and have him answer, right? Wrong:

Good Lord – a response! What a great chap! You should really read more about Mr. Kimberly since he’s an unsung hero who also headed Lamborghini for a spell and is hands down just as important to the history of Lotus as Chapman himself. To think that he was almost fired during his first year at Lotus by Chapman for flipping a Bond Bug the company had bought.

Anyway, there’s your answer. It proves once again that you shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions, and don’t judge car design and engineering decisions until you know the truth.

That wasn’t the end of “luxury” Lotus proposals. More recently, Lotus paraded the Eterna sedan concept in front of us with a V8 up front under the hood. Unlike the Elite/Eclat, it never saw production:

The Eterne resembles a facelifted and improved Tesla Model S, or maybe an Aston Martin concept; it looks like it might have been a nice four-door sedan had it been produced (and I like it more than that heavy-looking upcoming  Emeya). Here’s the thing, though: when was a Lotus supposed to be conventional and “nice”? When your six-year-old self saw a white Esprit racing down a mountain in a commercial for The Spy Who Loved Me, or when an Elise passed your family’s Cutlass, did you say “oh, that’s a nice car”? No, your eyes got big as saucers, and you couldn’t sleep; what the hell did you just witness? The Vauxhall Carlton that Mr. Kimberly was instrumental in modifying was not even remotely close to being a “nice” car; a 55-mile-an-hour maximum in the first of six gears, anyone?

Lotus, as the late Tina Turner sang, “never do anything nice…and easy”.  Challenging. Mind-blowing. Thrilling. That’s what Lotus was all about. Fiberglass as a load-bearing structure? Make the engine a stressed chassis member to get a few pounds of weight savings? A hole pattern drilled into a gas pedal to lose a few ounces? Sure. Lotus didn’t care if it cost twice as much for a one percent gain; the goal was to create the ultimate uncompromised handling machine for buyers who could tell the difference (and didn’t sweat about the inevitable reliability and durability price they’d have to pay beyond the steep entrance fee). Chapman had gone on record as saying that any car not built to win was a waste of time, space, and money.

The tuning Lotus did on the aforementioned Carlton did indeed create an awesome sedan, but if seventies- or eighties-era Lotus were going to make a new-from-the-ground-up sedan, would they really slap the badge with Colin’s initials onto a traditional, front-engined three-box sedan? Back in the day that would have been unlikely to achieve Chapman’s standards. If it was going to carry more than two people, Lotus of the era would have put Elite/Eclat type of out-of-the-box thinking into the solution for a car worthy of the Lotus name. But could the often cash-strapped firm afford to do it?

A Lotus owner once told me that compared to other cars he’d driven, Chapman’s cars sort of transcended handling; the line between “machine” and “driver” sort of blurred to the point that you became one with the machine you were operating. He admitted that it sounded like an adman’s cliche, but it was true. Surprisingly, while many car makers equated “handling” with “no suspension travel at all,” Lotus cars of the period offered a rather comfortable ride on the street for something with competition-car-like limits. Speaking of competition: take a look at the badge that Chapman stuck onto the cars he sold in the late seventies. Seven car Formula 1 constructor championships (the last with Mario Andretti as driver) and the first mid-engined car to win at Indy with the fabled Jimmy Clark.

This is not exactly People’s Choice Award cred there, is it? Thankfully for Ferrari’s racing team, Lotus ran flat out of money in the early eighties, with a mere 380 cars sold in 1980. The company was able to stay afloat by offering its world-class chassis development abilities to clients such as an infamous would-be cocaine dealer and Toyota. Well before you saw HANDLING BY LOTUS stickers on things like Isuzus, Lotus even helped fine-tune the road dynamics of the second-generation Celica Supra, a personal favorite of mine.

The best part of this Supra wasn’t even the crazy coolness of the design or the twin-cam straight six; it was the fact that it would never die. I saw an insanely clean example for sale when I was in LA a little while ago, and had I purchased it there is no question in my mind that I would have canceled my flight home, hopped in without so much as opening the hood, turned on the radio, cranked up the air conditioning, and driven 90 mph all the way back to Chicago. It’s a Toyota, you just assume it will all still work. How many other forty-year-old cars would you consider doing that with? Not a Lotus, that’s for sure.

Lotus as an acronym for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious is a common jibe, and the brand could certainly have used a helping of Toyota dependability in its cars – and for a while, Lotus had just that. In the early eighties, Toyota acquired a 16.5 percent interest in the firm, and Lotus even used Toyota components on the Elite/Eclat replacement, the Excel. Take a gander at those rims- look familiar?

Ultimately, General Motors stepped in to purchase a stake in Lotus, and while both Toyota and The General ran the firm for a few months, eventually the giant American company took over entirely. General Motors seems to have had the goal of making more affordable, higher volume cars such as the front-wheel-drive Isuzu-powered Elan. In retrospect, that might not have been a good direction to go; Chapman reportedly once said that building mass-market cars would result in them becoming “busy fools.” What if Toyota had bought Lotus instead, and really tried to expand the customer base of their cars while still maintaining their values? Volkswagen had Porsche, Fiat had Ferrari; why couldn’t Toyota buy some real high-end street cred?

If unparalleled handling is the goal of your car, it’s almost a given that the motor needs to be in the middle of the car, or at the very least as close to the back as possible. This type of layout is great for a sports car but it’s absolutely a nightmare if you put value in fitting more than two passengers and a lunchbox-sized suitcase. Few companies attempt it; who would bother making such compromises and demands on engineering and design to get the potential benefits many drivers wouldn’t even notice? Lotus would, or at least the Lotus of four decades ago. The new-for-1987 Escala would be just such a no-compromise four-door. The firm Chapman started had a reputation to live up to, and sadly, for much of this time, they were so down and out that they had nothing to lose by trying something different.

In my alternate reality of around 1986, Lotus and Toyota would take the soon-to-be-released 3VZ-E V6 engine, add an intercooled supercharger, and put it at the opposite end of the car from where it would go in the upcoming Camry it was destined for. (I’d add twin cams as well, which Toyota didn’t do until a few years later.) A backbone chassis similar to the Esprit would run down the center of the car, elongated to allow four seats to just barely fit in the space; “cab forward” is the key to getting passengers as close to the front as possible. It’s a bit like an upscale Fiero, though rest assured that we’re not talking a Camry subframe with the steering arms welded straight as on the Poncho. Something like this:

The styling of the Escala would possibly be an Ital Design creation not unlike the Etna show car that Lotus showed in 1984, a proposal for the next Esprit that seems to have set a direction that Peter Stevens took when developing the 1987 X-180 redesign of that iconic Lotus.

Asking if the Escala would be a wedge shape is almost like asking if the Pope is Catholic. Mind you, besides the additional length we need to raise the roofline from where it is on something like the Esprit. Like the Etna, the sharply raked beltline starts below the side mirrors and rises to the rear over the engine compartment to the body-colored “C” pillars. A similar, parallel line runs from the base of the windshield forward; the hood doesn’t drop as low as the Esprit since that would look at odds with the visual mass of the back of the car, and more importantly, the frunk would be too shallow to carry much luggage if we went to an Esprit-style point. The more blunt nose is not unlike the one seen later on that later Elan which needed such bonnet height to clear the Isuzu motor up front.

The wheel choice is non-negotiable. In 1972, Giugiaro penned the Maserati Boomerang concept, a wedge show car where the salient features were some of the most bonkers-looking alloy wheels I have ever seen. These rims never saw the light of day on any production car, and that’s a sin. We’ll proudly bolt these Ital Design masterpieces (with darker-painted insides) onto our Escala to add just the right amount of drama to our sleek but restrained shape. Aero covers could be an option based on the aesthetics and leanings of Giugiaro at the time, but you can keep them in the trunk on mine, thank you.

In back, a glass backlight is used instead of the exposed “flying buttresses” of the earlier Esprits. I tried a wraparound glass rear pillar as on the Etna but all of the character was lost. Trim bands across the back help to break up the visual mass of the rear and to sort of disguise the 1982-3 Supra taillights Toyota will grab from the bin.

Inside, a gauge pod similar to an Esprit is utilized, but it moves up and down with the steering wheel like on a Porsche 928. Toyota parts would fill the leather-bound dashboard binnacles. I don’t know about you, but I’d be praising Jesus, Allah, and any other God if I saw control stalks, radio, and climate control components out of a Cressida or Supra instead of Leyland cast-offs on the dash. As always, when I scribble these lower volume cars that need to dig into parts bins, I design around those pieces first so that the only thing that looks out of place is your typical late eighties Motorola car phone.

With the glove box, I’m addressing some pet peeves I’ve always had. First, the lid lifts up instead of being a drop-down thing that I can’t grab stuff out of in the pitch dark of the garage with the door half open against the wall. Next, I’ve put in set spaces for the crap that will always have to go in there anyway; note the dedicated binnacle for the leather-bound owner’s manual and things like a tire pressure gauge, pen, and flashlight; you know, items that usually end up in a rat’s nest of shit in your ‘box. Finally, cars with steeply raked windscreens always force the visor so far back that it’s awkward to use, and if you open the vanity mirror it’s right at your nose and OH MY GOD I LOOK OLD. Here we’ll put in a flip-down vanity mirror on the underside of the glove box lid to solve that; in addition, I might have slide-down visors instead of flip-down so they stay out of your face when pivoting.

This is strictly a four-seater with the gas tank located in the console separating the seats. Don’t expect S-Class level legroom in back, but as long as you’re not an NBA player it’s not like your knees will be in your face either. Also, all four door windows roll down unlike on a G-body Cutlass sedan. Notice the “spine” type seats that not only employ Chapman’s “add lightness” mantra but also offer additional legroom for the space-challenged rear occupants. Another trick is that the rear seats sit forward of the trailing edge of the door opening; the longer doors don’t help with getting in and out but they visually help reduce the mass between the rear doors and the back wheels.

You get two trunk spaces, and neither is cavernous in the expected compromise you get with a mid-engined layout, yet that’s a compromise that Lotus of the day would be willing to make. Up front, the raised-up hood lines give a bit more space:

I wanted to keep rear overhang to a minimum, but that might need to change to allow the trunk to get a little larger. You can see the Esprit-style engine cover and the extra rear window, as would likely have been requested by Mr. Kimberly:

Lotus of today has the cash of Geely behind it, so there’s really no limit to what it can do. I was most impressed by the Lotus of half a century ago that practically had to dig coins from the reception area couch cushions to keep the doors open but still managed to create cars that looked like they were from outer space, and you dreamed of having even the Corgi scale version. With help from a deep-pocketed partner in the eighties, Lotus could have created a new genre of precision-handling four-door supercar that was more than just a toy. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine any other sports car maker doing it.

Over the years, Lotus pioneered everything in competition cars from monocoque chassis to ground effects to active suspension. Chapman demanded such innovation in his street cars as well; after his passing, Mr. Kimberly’s presence would have ensured that something such as the Escala absolutely would not be some “nice car.” It would have been exactly what was expected out of Lotus: something totally unexpected.

1987 Lotus Escala Sedan

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