Lotus To Produce Own Engines
Singapore, 24 September, 2011 – Lotus Group will go into development and production of its own engine for its higher range of Sports cars, said Danny Bahar, the man at the steering wheel of Lotus at a media interview in Singapore today.
When asked if it was economically viable for Lotus to go into such a venture, Bahar said that the decision goes beyond economic reasons, “We are building cars that will cost around one hundred thousand pounds, and if you are one of our customers paying this price for a Lotus car, you wouldn’t want it to have an engine that was made for another sedan or limousine of some other make.” He went on to add, “We have some design philosophies, one of which is the philosophy of being light weight and high performance. We believe that with our own designed engines, we will be able to make our engines compact and light-weight, and we will be able to use various stages of tuning to match the engine to our specific requirements depending on the model.”
The engine that Danny Bahar is talking about is a 4.6 litre V8 that revs to around 9,000 rpm, and puts out 600 horsepower in naturally aspirated form. An engine of this nature obviously has vast potential for further development in terms of super charging and turbo charging, and should be flexible enough for evolution in the next decade or so.
Details are not clear at this stage, but it appears the prototype is due for starting up in November this year, with full development being completed by next summer. If all things go according to plan, we should start seeing some of these new engines in Lotus cars be end of 2013.
At the same media interview, the question was raised about the smaller range of Lotus cars that would appeal to the enthusiasts, especially about making them more affordable to Malaysians. Replying to this, Dato’ Sri Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamaed Tahir, Managing director of Proton Holdings, said that the possibility of local assembled Lotus cars is not to be ruled out as a measure to make them more affordable. Danny Bahar also added that the group is looking at improving and streamlining the manufacturing processes to improve efficiency, and bring costs down to more affordable levels.
