Lotus Engineering provides consultation services to other car makers, such as its owner Proton and ex-owner GM. In particular, GM relies heavily on it - the development of Ecotec engines and the handling tuning of Astra are conducted by Lotus instead of GM s engineers. In the past decade, Lotus Engineering has grown a lot and became the largest contributor to the group s profit. 

Lotus Cars is relatively weak. The recent revival is solely due to the success of Elise, which is now going to be produced at a rate of 3,200 units per year. A few years back the whole company produced just 300-400 cars. Elise is so successful because it is back to the old Lotus principle - enhance performance through lightness. Especially is the aluminium chassis technology, which won GM's contract to develop and produce the Opel Speedster. In addition to the forthcoming M250, Lotus is planning to raise its production volume to 10,000 cars per annum in 2001, that is just behind Porsche.

Obviously, Chapman is a pure racing car engineer heart and bone. To fund his ambitious racing project, he started building road cars. In 1957, the Mk 6 race car was transformed to the first-ever Lotus road car - Mk 7. The car is renowned for lightness and good handling. It is still building by Caterham today under license. At the same year he unveiled the Elite which employed a revolutionary composite monocoque body. 

The Elan of 1962 was the peak of Lotus. Having learned from the lesson of Elite, Chapman designed a cheaper steel backbone chassis for the new roadster. Power came from Ford is twin cam engine. The pretty roadster ran as fast as it sold. A total production of 12,000 cars set the company s all-time record. 

After Elan is the first mid-engined sports car, Europa, which also sold well. Since the 60 s, Lotus s business expanded to engineering consultation to other car makers, such as developing the chassis for DeTomaso Mangusta and DeLorean, the tuning of Lotus (Ford) Cortina, Lotus Sunbeam, Lotus (Opel) Omega and developed the engine for Chevrolet Corvette ZR1. The engineering business became more and more important as the car production slumped from the 70 is to the early 90 is. As a result, Lotus Engineering departed from the road car division, just like Team Lotus did in the 50 is.  

The decline of car sales was due to the neglect to the road car division. Chapman concentrated on his F1 challenge and left the road cars to be handled by others. The Esprit of 1976 was designed to be a mid-engined supercar challenging Ferrari and Porsche, but the self-developed four cylinder 907 engine was not considered to worth the price, even in turbocharged form. The production quality and the completeness of design were never the company s strength, so attacking the supercar market was simply a wrong decision. In addition to the oil crisis, new supercars without established brand image suffered the most. 

In 1981, Colin Chapman died suddenly due to heart attack. Lotus got into financial trouble and sold 25% stocks to Toyota in 1984. Since then the Japanese giant learned the multi-valve engine technology and put it into mass production. 4 years later, Toyota left and Lotus was completely took over by GM.  

GM spent some 40 million dollars to the development of the new Elan Mk II, hoping it to pump the volume to 3,000 cars annually. However, the little roadster went to the wrong direction - a front-wheel-drive configuration, a small capacity turbo engine and an overweight body. All of these conflict with Chapman s philosophy. Most important is that the little Lotus was very expensive compare with the Japanese competitors, most notably is Mazda MX-5. The car sold poorly, thus GM pulled out in 1993 and sold Lotus to Italian tycoon Romano Artioli who had already revived Bugatti. 

The white-hair man did little to help Lotus. He did approved the Elise project and donated this name after his grand daughter. However, everybody would have approved this low cost project under such financial condition. The Elise was proved to be a great success, thanks to its aluminium chassis and conformation to Chapman is principle - enhance performance through lightness. However, Artioli got into financial trouble as his Bugatti bankrupted. He sold majority shares to Malaysian car maker Proton in 1996.