Lotus Elise - The Inside Story

in 1994 Lotus was its faith and its future in a revolutionary new sports car developed in record time on the tightest budgets it would showcase technologies which could revolutionize the automotive industry this is the inside story of project M 111 [Music] the Lotus 7 was a revolution when it was launched in 1957 delivering racing car performance and production car prices it's become an icon an enthusiast scar the epitome of high performance achieved through lightweight rather than sheer power but when Lotus looked to recapture its spirits in a new car for the 90s inspiration came from an altogether different source I don't treat a tallest transport that's there's nothing to do with it as you're riding around on something which is all tidy inside you know it's like a beautiful woman with a nice personality it's so clear cut in its execution it makes such a strong statement about what it's about and I mean longer that the same statement about its owner if you take the clothes off the ducati you see lots of nice things [Music] they are the best doubt about it they've got a great racing history and they look fabulous and they've got a real surge or like quality about the way put together I mean it's just it's just a nice piece of kit to have everything's down to the lightweight beautifully engineered and it's just its whole purpose is to be this it's motorbike which they make the road was actually a racing machine that's all it's so exciting about it but it's just there's no compromise thing you know they don't they don't want to sell them in big numbers they only have to sell them to the you know the people who really know and that's what's nice about it it's very nice to have the same bike as your friend oh they are very similar but they're not the same and mine's got a slightly different engine and we swap and we compare and it's there's a sort of a boys thing to do you know to ride around together it's got this awesome performance but although I don't use it I know it's there and it's like I suppose there's a sort of feeling that you could have if maybe misers have that feeling when they've got lots of money and they never spend it but they know it's there Richard Rackham and Julian Thompson would become key players in the new car project code-named I'm 111 the actual link between the 111 project the bike was something which we could immediately see what was it desired from the car and it's very sad this wants to be just like a Ducati which is a bit of a a toy and a rich boy's toy and just something that he just loved having a love owning that's what's important something like that quality would like to have in a car slowly to start with this project Lotus was founded by Colin Chapman who was a very clever engineer and above all else I think a very competitive man in everything he did during the 1960's Lotus was perhaps the one of the most famous of racing car manufacturers and this was the period in which Lotus is racing heritage was was largely formed and one of the cars that contributed very largely to this was a car called the Lotus 23 and what this car achieved was to take on the might of the established sports car races from Ferrari in the major continental manufacturers and to really leave them for day [Music] a decade later in a bid to improve the company's profitability Colin Chapman took Lotus up markets and launched the Esprit over the last 20 years it's developed into a powerful sophisticated and with a price tag of up to 60,000 pounds an expensive member of the supercar community in the 1980s Lotus wanted to add to our product range in addition to the Esprit by presenting a smaller two-seater sports car we identified a very substantial market for this car and in order to equip ourselves to meet this demand we invested a large amount of money in the engineering program and in fact in the the production process [Music] the Ilana fact was was quite a successful car in terms of sales and a market reception to that but it really cost too much to make and turned out to be quite a complex car and the market that were aiming it for it we either had to charge a lot more money for it or the volumes would just go down to be so small that we it wouldn't be viable to do the Elan had to fight in a market which was flooded with cheaper Japanese sports cars it became clear to Lotus that they would never recoup their investments in the Elan and in June 1992 made the decision to stop production which meant the loss of 300 jobs at its factory in Norwich Lotus was really founded on making lightweight simple efficient cars and a lot of our customers are coming back and say yep the cars you might know fine and they're okay but you know what's happened to those original cars we think there's still an opportunity to have those I mean we would like to buy such a car with lights us and to buy something that we can go and drive on a circuit or do a hill climb or a sprint with which is not going to cost us too much money it's not too complicated to look after you know what is there any possibility to make such a car so that really did inspire us to go and look to see what we could do this is going to look this is just an old car you want to let a seven you buy a notice and it does have some some really great elements about it and they like like virtually no overhangs and that sort of thing you know yeah it's open bodied you just got this like amazing sort of like wheel at every corner because he suddenly thought let's try to do modern versions of that you're the donkervoort than me rack cars like that and they've all taken that and they've all tried to build on it when we lose themselves when it's the later version of this this car the super 7 I mean the update wasn't as good as original it's just it's just an icon it's good it'll remain the same everyone who's tried to do one of those cars is a caricature it essentially oh yeah I mean I think the philosophy is what we're trying to capture and I don't think the look of the car is what notices stands for anymore you know we are a modern design house but we're trying to do something which is state-of-the-art there needs to have sort of like a hard edge no compromise sort of attitude - which is which is what the seven is all about isn't it you know people who drive sevens they're like a bit of a breed apart because yeah it's not your everyday car man - I've got a disadvantage that we only have to make so many hundred or just a couple of thousand cars and so we're running out looking for this really specialized customer same customer buys you know really nice watch or a motorbike or something like that so we can cater just for this really cool blow for a better term and we don't have to cater for housewives might have a like that and that's our advantage driving disappoint yeah so our limited production numbers we are we want to turn that round so we can actually produce something really special while the designers were discussing how the new cartridge look others were in no doubt about how it should feel to drive the ride and handling characteristics of Lotus cars a legendary and they're determined by development engineers like Dave Minter who here is driving an Atlanta on the Lotus test track when we start to develop a new vehicle it's really up to us as ride and handling engineers to be able to give it the characteristics and the flavor of the car that we want so we've got a responsible job really in that we can dictate how the cars gonna behave a black art because we can nowadays in the in the 1990s we can do a lot of objective tests we can measure the rate of roll we can measure this we can measure that with in the end of the day it really comes down to the driver the subjective evaluation of the driver it's also very important the feel of the of the gear changes you have to feel as if it's rewarding to change gear otherwise you might as well be driving an automatic version and that's not really what sports cars are associated with they along back and the car remains very neutral all the way through [Music] that's a characteristic with the with the vehicle available we walk we will want to to keep in the new at 111 then 111 is gonna be a bit different it's gonna be a bit more of a dynamic car so the car will be slightly harder than this weekend they're do much experimenting with the with the Springs with the dampers and on a project like this will probably change the the inside of the dampers the actual valving inside the dampers we probably it changed that 4050 perhaps times before we get that ideal setting that we want probably more than anything else the tire the tire makes a huge contribution to the road handling and the and the dynamics of the vehicle so we can change all these things and it's our job to sift through all these variables to come up with a specification which is fun for the something that's been focused upon a lot in the last particular the last five years as emissions and particularly greenhouse gases and one of the major contributions to that is using fuel if you use more fuel you're going to create more of these type of gases so an obvious way out of that is to go to a very fuel-efficient car and again the way to do that is to make a very lightweight car because it means that you can make a car with very high performance but with a low powered fuel-efficient engine all high-volume motor manufacturers are under pressure to develop lightweight fuel-efficient vehicles but it'll call for a radical change in the way they build their cars there's a confidence gap the big car companies are almost too big to gamble on going into production with revolutionary lightweight technologies which might not work but Lotus felt it could and early on in the m1 11 project the rover group became involved in discussions keen to support and encourage the Lotus engineers I think it's very important particularly for our engineering clients they understand the risks we're taking with a project such as this but after being taken over by BMW Rover pulled back from the project leaving lotus on their own I think it's always helpful to have a sort of Big Brother overlooking you but on the other hand we are used to running our own type of business and quiet sort of flexibly so I don't think we've felt particularly vulnerable we had a situation where the board of directors of Lotus could see that we had a vision of a product which could be very successful that they had a group of engineers who were not only capable of achieving the program and doing it very efficiently but will be driven by enthusiasm to make the car as exciting as they possibly could but also that the idea of performance through lightweight and demonstrating new technologies would be relevant to the whole of the motor industry in January of 1994 the board of Lotus cars gave the go-ahead for project M 111 many staff at Lotus had a vision of what the M 111 should be but it was the head of the styling team who was asked to flesh out the basic concept Julie Ann Thompson it's all young boys are interested in cars you know we start playing them I'm gonna start drawing them mean I certainly all my nephew's normally young kids and they're always interesting cars it's one of the things boys - and most of them grow out of it and some of them don't and I think that's where a lot of car designers come from basically and I just kept drawing cars for some reason I don't know why just like to go on the memories of my parents having cars were that we just had a Bedford van and a mini and we just used to just trade his in for another bitty better than mini for years and years and years we never had anything cool at all we had a friend of ours Kim and a console GT and it was like the coolest thing they'd ever been in our driveway my mother from Thailand and we have distant links into drive family we are related to the king it was a lustrous in the king and I at that one I think he's like great very grand father something like that but we get we actually pretty well in certain time and it has to be said my office does a split of roughly fifty fifty percent notice work and outside consultancy work for various manufacturers around the world but obviously their stuff myself and Madeline is like doing is Dean lotuses you know we like we love doing that it's very very close to our heart the company has been its ups and downs but yeah I think a lot of my team and stay there weightings not for the chance to do the new Lotus any project like this we start with sketches and ideas you know you can't stop my design is doing this sort of thing but what was unusual in this projects is that we didn't really start with an engineering package from engineering and so like decorate it for want of a better term we actually started the plank of wood on the floor and a seat and so we started this very very early but very very basic terms we just got a steering wheel and gear leaver in position and we build up a fake windscreen and surround and you know we said is this fun does this need to be loud as this needs to be higher so we could get some idea about what its gonna be like to look out of this thing and we're very keen to establish an exciting driving environment you know there were so many questions about getting into the car how the occupants were the windscreen should be all to just have this great sense of occasion there are over a thousand engineers at Lotus and there's over a thousand ideas about what the N 111 should be and I think the first task of the most difficult task was actually to get everybody to agree on a common direction so the first page of that really was decide what it was going to be and it almost went without saying it should be an open sports car and there was very little debate over that the position of the engine and we had some debate but I think that was quite easily resolved we did look at a front-engine rear-wheel-drive as with the Lotus 7 but very soon we we felt that the mid-engine configuration made more sense for several reasons first of all is very much easier to develop the crash structure on the front of the car when you don't have an engine in the way secondly Formula one cars all run with mid engines a very good reason the dynamics of the car are more exciting and more interesting and I think from a marketing standpoint a mid-engine car is is more acceptable it's very much more of a Lotus 7 inspired vehicle right but with a much more modern direction there more integration to the wings etc they're still picking on us at a race car theme what I try to do here is create much more integrated design though so we're actually blending the body into the rear wheel arches my own concern about this is perhaps it's a too much of a caricature of a lotus servant yeah it's one of those things that maybe want to load a 70 by Allah to seven it's not really bringing the game forward at all is it so I've then moved through here and I'm looking at cars we should park back to some extent two notices of the past there's lots of classic Lotus design keys on here the mouth etc which you see on the viola and the latest 23 etc my only concern with this is we have a very very broken line here because of the cut down doors nothing that people would would lack a certain amount of security inside the vehicle but most importantly we're losing the strength of the line through the car again now yours a lot more retro Andy if I can say that yes I mean you can see I think some of the themes that I've tried to pick out here are these things we've been talking about where it's a bit like a motorbike for the road this one again here is sort of like looking at a simple almost a I get you home soft top roof it's just something that you scrunch up in a bag and throw in the boot and if it looks like it's gonna pour you can put it over the top of the roof to em to get you home the N 111 was conceived as a step in car a car with no doors but inspired by cars like this 1950s Mercedes the design team argued for distinctive gullwing doors project manager Tony shoot bid they were too complex I mean the Gullwing I think technically is very nice everybody likes the idea but I think in a way it's down to Chris because if we can't do it you know we haven't got much time to do such a system we're not confident day one that we can make it work for Emily it doesn't wind noise etc etc and we really have got to consider whether we can pursue that route anymore I think the loop you're going going round is if you glazed it with perspex which is all this proposal has come from around young people in styling we're not sure about forming something that size accurately and I don't think it'll be stiff enough as a panel so it will be able to mold up a composite unit of it to the section which is going to add weight also you didn't really need to support it with a strap so your intern and mechanical straddle small gastric and then you're going to go through the ceiling loop you need gutters round all up all the edges to get adequate drainage also forget that a conventional door event some soft top so as it can customers concerned isn't that attractive when compared you can put it against a Gullwing yeah oh man it makes it twice the car it's very visually exciting isn't it there they go we you know and in certain applications as well it makes entry and exit much easier if you look at this program it's incredibly ambitious anyway I think we've got to decide whether we're gonna achieve it or not and if we can all buy into it now then I don't think we should do it not job one anyway why they should give it another four weeks when I suggest you go back and have a look at the window system to see if you can't with an idea on there and also stowage of the system and then we decide in four weeks four weeks later the idea of gullwing doors was dropped [Music] the home of the Lotus Group has a stake in the future of the m1 11 modules Lotus cars put Lotus Engineering a highly successful consultancy company which supplies its expertise to motor companies all over the world there are these two divisions of Lotus the Lotus cars side is about 200 people and the consultancy business the engineering company is about a thousand people and the turnover of each company is about the same and the way in which this project has been financed is by me stealing the research budget from engineering for two years which of course they want something back in in return and that is really a demonstrator that we as a engineering consultancy company are capable of producing a technically interesting motorcar very early on in the in the n1 11 project we realized that were areas of expertise which we hadn't got within the company so we needed a series of what we call collaborative partners who would come in to this project and provide us with the expertise that we need Lotus wanted to use lightweight aluminium to build the chassis for the m1 11 so form links with hydro Hali mininum in Denmark [Music] the company's part of the norsk hydro group and has been involved in the production of aluminium mostly for the construction industry for over 30 years [Music] recently hydro set up a new division automotive structures a new part of the company to specialize in developing and manufacturing lightweight components for the automotive industry components have formed by taking billets of aluminium like these eating them to make them soft then squeezing them through the complex die to form extrusions an extrusion is something that most of us would understand if we thought about it that tuba toothpaste when we squeeze toothpaste we extrude a solid cylinder of that paste out if there was a little ball on the exit nozzle of the toothpaste when you squeeze the toothpaste you squeeze a tube at now you see this sort of thing with in the kitchen with macaroni a pasta machine all this is taste taken a big blob of Pasteur and it's squeezing it through a dye and it comes out of shape an extrusion is that we take a billet of aluminium push it through a dye and it comes out that shape and if you want cavities energy but these balls shapes in the way so the material has to squeeze but around them and you get the cavity it's squeezed add in lengths you know they can be continuous lens of twenty meters or so it's produced an alarming rate [Music] and on the 111 one squeeze which takes about a minute will last several years production for some of the small components not on the chassis but individual components it's really a material cost you pay for you don't pay for this great form you just pay for the weight of material because the process is so quick once Richard Rackham had understood the potential of complex extrusions like these he began to design his own for the chassis of the m1 11 his colleagues were surprised by this completely new approach to building a car you want us going on making a car structure out of greenhouse parts you know there's what most people say or double glazing that's why greenhouses and double glazing tomato extrusions because they're incredibly adaptable and used in the correct way they say a different set of advantages can be brought into a car structure this is the level of sketch that we get to before we go to full size but it's full of lies so we have to go to full size understand how an occupant will interface with these ideas the occupant Agent Orange is shown here everything about him centers around the hip point she's their Agent Orange as we call him is a result of wartime American research into how how big they should make the cockpit of aeroplanes this is mr. 95th percentile that means 95% of the people the population would be comfortable inside this car the unfortunate thing is in 1945 or 1950 people were a lot smaller so they were allowed to clicks more rear would travel on the seat and a little bit more Headroom the great thing about using tapes in this story is that you can just rip them off it's if we change our mind about where this side duck should go this is a style they can sort of do that and then reposition and quite simply and is he very easy to visualize it's not as hard as a pencil you see there are pencil lines on here but they're all very soft and it's worth you know using the two mediums but it's um now we know how that whose color to your font is like Blue means chassie orange means occupant and we put various other sort of colors in there so you when you when you're working just with the chassis even you can see all the relevant lines are it's it's a and the thickness of the line as well just like with pencil you'll you'll push a little bit harder when you mean it now we put the line in here for the ground we really mean the ground is there we really mean the tires there and the outside shape is there but we got a little sketch in there maybe a bit more thinking about it and we've got a thin line on there were yes this is a good way of expression soon after the basic building blocks of the chassis were laid out on the tape drawing the details were fed into a computer aided design package and a three-dimensional model began to take shape this incredibly accurate tool would become the reference point for the scores of engineers working on the project and in the absence of a real car the arbiter in many a dispute about who could put which component where but notice were not the only company working on a lightweight aluminium chassis for a sports car Renault were also working on one for the sports Spyder also with hydro aluminium in Denmark the Renault chassis is welded together Lotus believed they could use much thinner extrusions and therefore save even more weight if they glued or bonded theirs together now the engineering company wanted us to bond because that's what our customers are interested in we also had an expert employee who told us we should weld which also encouraged us to go down the bonded route and I think that's quite important and to actually meet that the cost and the weight targets that we have for the frame we couldn't seem to achieve that through a world 'add structure Lotus then needed expertise on glue after talking to several adhesive manufacturers they found a second strategic partner in Siebert polymers at Duxford in Cambridgeshire back to the early days this was when Normandy Bruni started this company he was a Cambridge University Don and he was very interested in flying wanted to build his own aeroplane aeroplanes in those days were built using wood and canvas and the glues that we used to bond them were milk derived and they were subject to fungal attack under moist conditions Normandy brownie very wisely saw that an adhesive would be useful which didn't degrade under those conditions he thus developed the arif urea-formaldehyde adhesives from there this company got involved in many many aircraft structures car industry has some different requirements to the aircraft industry in the aircraft industry most of the metal being bonded now is large area so the adhesive doesn't have such a concentrated stress also believe it or not in the aircraft industry you don't really need very much in the way of impact resistance if a plane and goes into a hillside I don't think any amount of adhesive would help very much the car has to resist normal running and also any crash loads that imposed on it and so we had to build an adhesive which would be high-strength withstand the weight of the engine and other loads in it the passengers but also be resistant to impact loads during crashes now normally you'd think of a high-strength adhesive I would guess as being something that's withstands the high loads but is quite hard and easily shattered what we've managed to do is combine that with the properties of rubber which of course under impact is very resistant and doesn't shatter so you've got those two properties combined in one adhesive in the past that hasn't been possible the adhesive was a breakthrough but many questions remained about the bonding process Sima lotus and hydro pulled resources to research the key issues and to treat the aluminium surfaces for bonding and how and in what conditions the glue should be applied throughout this period Lotus always had a fallback position a design for a slightly different chassis which could have been welded other motifs workshops at Hethel near norwich engineer's began testing the first of the bonded aluminium joints and used a simple rake to compare them with joints that had been welded maybe dynamic testing we're dropping away to fifteen point seven kilograms just freefall over a height around about two meters this this test here is one of the dynamic tests that we did the main problem with using adhesives is peel stresses which you're getting in in our case in this corner here as we're applying the loads here in order to alleviate this problem we've read of mechanical fastenings as close as we can to the corners of the joint basically if we can put a rivet in as soon as the adhesive starts to peel away and hits that where the rivet is the peel stress will stop so therefore we shouldn't have as much destruction of the of the bond area if we compare this to a natural welded joint which we have here this had again the same energy put into it as we can see we've got a lot of buckling of this member here and also quite a lot of buckling here under these experimental conditions the bonded joints which included rivets to stop peel stresses were proving stronger than the joints which had been welded so the prospect of a bonded aluminium chassis looked promising however the legal department was about to drop a bombshell which would result in a redesign and a headache which would cost the project hundreds of thousands of pounds we've got to the stage now the basic concept of the car was a stepping vehicle without doors and I mean it's a bit of a problem to us we've now pointed out there is a regulation whereby with the design that we haven't present we don't meet legal requirements in terms of step over height I think it's important a starling understand this in some detail because it's going to change the project quite dramatically if we're now going to go away from a doorless car and go into a car with doors well if we if the entry area that available is more than 750 millimeters from the ground then that's new you have to have a running boards when you say running boards you mean some sort of step the area designed into the side side of the car like a Land Rover or something like that yeah you've got a signed in are they you've got the drawers that hooked it on the side you really got a drop the top of the door everything probably 39 well I mean with the concept that we're running with at the moment I mean that's basically completely you know an accessible we're very keen to keep you know the flowing line that we're developing through there and you know we certainly don't I have anything where you actually sort of like effectively got cut away sort of door holes which does or make the vehicle look very sort of a beach buggy Shore sort of open cheapish from a visual point of view and there's no way we would accept that oh it's pretty yeah pretty basic well I guess it is from your point when it just is there we have to meet we have to meet that regulation no I mean it's gonna mean quite a major car laughter the whole concept of the car yeah we've possibly only talked about coming down 30 millimeter that doesn't seem to me to be very much I guess I mean where we're coming from is that we would much prefer to keep the visual line of the car that we're developing and and have some sort of system whereby you can open the door as well just to aid you know access into the car you're talking about a lot of engineering you know tradition yet Lotus you know doors aren't easy next will be intuitive wind-up windows and things like that door locks and it's a whole new bunch of regulations that we have to leave as soon as beginning to do all locks this is a build cost well the engineering costs I think given the choice between doing add or a new engine I think I'll choose the new engine the need to develop doors would eventually cost the project's nearly half a million pounds the next bombshell from the owners of Lotus landed in the design office suddenly I had this threat of maybe this car was gonna not be designed at Hethel it's gonna be Thomas one of our competitors and because we didn't ever get he very well because they're Italian them because they passed lots of other Italian design houses we're very very worried about losing it and personally I I hated that time and there was excitement of doing this car but having this threat of being taken away from us was horrible a packing crate a meter square arrived with proposals from eight other design houses I had to stick knees up in my office alongside our designs and you know we won datum and that was very satisfying and I could have done about it sure once we completed the initial sketch phase we are very keen to get into the next area which is three dimensional scale models the sketches can only tell you so much they can give you a character of the car but you can't really understand and shape till you get to this stage from this model we identified that perhaps this was a little low overall height wise that this sill was probably too high to step over and I think the model was a it was just a little bit too short to package what we wanted to do into it so we moved on to the next stage which is a green car the green car addresses a lot of the problems that we had in a silver car and also moves the styling on the next phase were always progressing it looking at it so this model is getting much closer to the rail car which now has gone to the next stage which is a full-size model [Music] when we first sent me the full-size clay to go and be machined the company that did this for us at a very competitive price had never machined a clay before and it made such a mess in their workshop that they vowed never ever to do it again but it was fascinating watching this this blob of clay just being turned into into a 111 it's quite a fascinating sight [Music] we prefer not to notice a lot of detail development and scale model we prefer to get a full-size so we would digitally scanned the scale model measured it all over and they've got a computer to make a full-size image and machine a block of clay it's not a solid block of clay it's got about a 30 mil skin or a foeman wood armature the problems you always have when you go from a scale model up to a full-size is that there are scaling problems you know if you look at a car on the table and it's it's big and everly when it gets to proper size and you're working in a car park it's not going to be exactly the same a good example of that is when people like Collier something make a scale model of a car they exaggerate certain features on it just so it looks right the clay we use isn't actually like potter's clay it's more like a like a wax and that it comes out of an oven hot it's gone it's a bit like melted chocolate at that point you actually moment it sets it's it's like it's like hard chocolate while the full-scale clay was emerging a third scale model of DM 111 had been taken to a wind tunnel for aerodynamic testing of the motor industry research Association in its crudest form though the wind tunnel is a large working section where air is drawn through the tunnel past the actual model you have a belt a large rubber belt rotating underneath the model representing a moving ground so that that's moving at the same speed as the wind and we replicate the way that the car moves in the wind relative to the ground in real life within the wind tunnel model we have what we have a balance it's a glorified pair of bathroom scales basically it measures the forces in three directions it measures it the longitudinal sense moon measuring the aerodynamic drag the vertical sense the aerodynamical and the horizontal transverse sense the Atlantic side Falls there's often no substitute for literally seeing what's going on so we'll use a smug string it's a vaporized paraffin oil that's pumped through a through a heated lance and that physically visualizes the airflow as it moves over the car fundamentally we knew we were going to have problems that are dynamically with a car right from the word go the physical proportions of the car remember we were going to have problems and the initial design concept was one which was very striking from a visual point of view but I knew it was gonna cause me some problems it's very short very stubby very fat very low that inherently usually means high drag it's not gonna be an ultra sleek ultra low drag car the initial results were not desperately good and there was some suggestion that it was about her aerodynamic as a brick this is kind of unfortunate because the car had a real style to it and whatever happened we didn't want to lose that that look at the vehicle the aerodynamicist did a spot of restyling in the wind tunnel mainly to combat rear lift then broke the news to designer Julian Thompson destroyed certain aspects of the car completely yeah I mean when the back end design is just completely this is Sam this is taken like to the finest level isn't it we built it up yeah as we went on obviously tested what you see here is is within the proportions of the car we've just taken various features in the various lines to the to the the ultimate limit if you like but anybody can design a car and if it's you just leave it there and that's the easy part done to actually go make it work that's the skillful bit and the trick is to decide what has to be done and what is an optional part to be done and then get on and do it no this is so fundamental character the car thing but we've gotta be got a look at ways of trying to kill some of this really now this is just one way of doing it it's a fairly extreme one but and there are probably more subtle ways and we can explore those you know fundamentally you need to look for some kind of visual form which allows for this trailing edge to come back up and make it sharper probably had this model approved by our management and now we're gonna come back and say well actually we have to do it all differently now one of the problems is that we've got a very high roll bar in this car compared to the the length from the car these are very short no reason I just don't know how we're gonna make this work have you got any ideas because I don't know nice if it's the car and it's gone now there's two ways you could do it isn't there I mean we could you could actually build a spoiler kind of a car like this with Navis bone and kind of a spoiler we could see I'm sure we could have some kind of integral of the integral feature not not necessarily a standalone spoiler like on the it's free but a built-in feature to the car which basically as sharp as up this edge as the discussion on restyling continued the first prototype chassis arrived at Lotus from Denmark when they first chassis arrived at Lotus obviously that was a key point in the design program and it was quite exciting as the box arrived and it got lifted out and put on display and then everybody's reaction to it it was like something that come from another planet because it's a very aesthetically nice piece and iminium is a very nice material to look at and touch and it's a very simple chassis which people that think could relate to a lot of people thought it looked weird because there's nothing seem like it before there were a lot of people walking around banging it and listening to the sound of the drum that was the I think that was probably the biggest criticism but for every one of those I think they were probably a hundred he looked at it and thought this looks really space-age this is where we should be going for the next four weeks technicians worked around the clock trying to get the first chassis running before the Christmas break on Christmas Eve they were still at it we desperately came to drive the car before Christmas and everybody working many many hours and it would have been very disheartening to go away for the Christmas break and not knowing what it was like and there seemed to be at six o'clock in the evening about fifty items that still needed to be done looked like an impossible task but the question was was there anything we couldn't do by midnight and nobody could come up with anything we couldn't do so therefore I logic we should be able to do it the excitement had been building through the day lots of people were guessing how much it's going to weigh that little sweepstake amyot there was a the enthusiasm of the technicians just I've never known anything like it was we were all getting stuck in we just wanted this thing to the roll and we were at the time we even thought it didn't look half bad because you know love is blind of looking at their proto one models hideous [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] when it's time to drive we've fired the thing up I put a crash helmets on and went out onto the test track it's icy brilliant moonlit night it was quite well it's really you know when as magic moments the first impressions of the car were really quite amazing because the car was very very quick the engine that the torque and the lack of weight in the thing was just so dramatic it was quite a surprise also the steering response and items like that on a first off prototype were just something I say of almost not experienced before him and I remember as we were coming around the the main straight of the circuit at Lotus I started to get wet and I thought we were really lucky because have we been five minutes later would have not been able to go out because I've been pouring with rain but I hadn't realized what it was a heater pipe that had come off and I was getting covered in antifreeze which the lease was keeping me warm if nothing else so as a great man we got the car back to the workshop all then disappeared off down to have a few have a few beers in the pub we also realised we got an awful lot of work to do the following year there was a lot of development a lot of durability testing just a massive massive task so he went away happy for Christmas but we realized that was going to be a tough tough year to come in the new year proto 1 was taken to Millbrook a top security vehicle Proving Ground in Bedfordshire to be tested to destruction the big concern was over the aluminium chassis and the revolutionary way it had been gooed or bonded together laboratory tests suggested bonding was stronger than welding but would the bonded chassis survive years of battering on real roads the Millbrook test circuits are designed to find out the big test for a bonded structure for any structure is for to complete what is known as a Belgian pave test that's 1,000 miles of extreme testing of its severe surfaces it's like the worst road you can go over it's called pave from Belgian pave when the roads were traditionally made out of cobblestones and it just vibrates the car to death and if a vehicle can survive that without any structural problems it's done quite well [Music] but you run around a 30 miles per hour you can only do that for about 15 minutes stretch then you have to arrest the shakes you about so much [Music] the main reasons that we use mill brokers they have correlated data so they know what happens with the cars being in normal service say for 10 years or for 20 years compared to their accelerated tests that they do within the proving ground we use the Millbrook engineers to do the work we don't do it ourselves the car is going through a controlled process and therefore the data that comes back is really meaningful so we can react to it and not start changing things unnecessarily and which is just as important as making changes to make sure all the car is is durable I think the thing that's really encouraging - everybody's been in the car is the ride comfort and the feel of a really solid structure and it's obviously going to be a very nice platform from which to develop the ride and handling on the vehicle even over the pave with these extreme inputs there is really no sort of squeaking or rattling in the car and it feels absolutely solid you put any car on there it's gonna fall apart at a certain extent our first bonded chassis went round and there weren't any fail is on the bonded chassis as we knew that if Whittaker if this had been welded it would have had failure the great thing about a bond is the stretched distribution in the joint it's a huge area to take all that the loads going in whereas a world is a very fine line trying to do just as much work so that point it was a brain out decision bonding was in the main chassis structure continued to prove immensely strong but three quarters of the way through the pave testing cranks began to appear in the rear subframe which had also been made of aluminium used in alimony rear subframe is not it's just the loads going in it doesn't want to be made from aluminium you know with I feel like we're doing it because the rest of the cars made of extrusions whose make expensive as well it's not if it doesn't land you know the rest of the structure it is is quite elegant but to use no I mean your air subframe bonded together isn't a direction I'm happy with another another problem which we haven't really thought about I've only just realized is that the catalyst we're testing now the middle of winter 30 miles an hour on parle now if you put that into the middle of a Italian summer odd weather for much more enclosed for a render more we've got the catalyst temperatures gonna be going into that rear subframe and the adhesive is good for a 200 degree C catalyst is run at 600 lots and lots of for heat insulation in there and we got to come up with a web making from steel which doesn't a store you know we want half a millimeter AK dimensional accuracy on all the hard points and it's not easy either because they the transverse engine there's a it's difficult to get around this now this reinforcement has had to be put on to really hold the thing together yeah I think there's some serious cracks here yeah well given the time available I think I'll prefer to go to a steel one straight away because we know we can make it work we can make them in-house and the problem will go away in styling there was a problem which wouldn't go away the full-size claim model which would be the master template for all the m1 Elevens body panels had arrived at the design studio the team of model makers had begun the intricate task of shaping its surfaces by hand this is how the head of design Julian Thompson intended the car to look with simple flowing lines but Windtunnel tests on a third scale model had shown that Julian Thompson's original design gave the car too much rear lift the aerodynamicists feared that in such a light car it could cause instability so the design had to be changed we had to add on these a spot on the back which we did agonize over a lot because it did it did take away some of the purity of the car but did that it did add some originality and it did add some aggression so and now I'm I don't have a problem with it really I don't yes they're quite like it actually the reason we use claim we don't use wood or foam and everything like that is because the whole process of developing the model means changing the law we employ model makers to build not just both immoral once but to keep changing it to our instructions to keep taking away and trying different things in three dimensions so the good model maker has to have a lot of patience this designers he has to be prepared to make something beautifully and then have a design the same and under my kit do something else after the redesign prototype 2 fitted with handmade body panels was taken to a full-size wind tunnel we came to a nice compromise in the middle between the styling and the aerodynamics the designers were happy with what they were seeing visually when we got to the full-scale prototype stage in the wind we were looking a little bit more detail and that stage we found that weird got not surprisingly a compromised result to compromise performance between the one extreme that I've developed a model scale and the initial starting point of the of the designers because by the time we got to this full circle test and development stage we found that who's the car felt very good there was pretty much just that right amount of turbulence in the car just the right amount of wind in the hair it was it was pretty good there was a little bit of tweaking to be down on the rear buttresses they had to be brought in board a little bit because a little bit too much air was diving in boarding loads but um it was pretty close to what weird intended for the car that state once the styling of the m1 11 had been signed off it was then over to the manufacturing team to put the panels into production 20 years ago Lotus invented very vacuum assisted resin injection a process of mechanized molding where sheets of fiberglass are sandwiched between two molds and resin is injected between them at high pressure the process is accurate produces a consistently high quality panel and has low labor costs this is a very mold for an inner panel on the m1 11 the network of piping ensures equal distribution of heat during the curing process but it soon became obvious that the complex curves and swooping shapes of the m1 Elevens outer panels could not be made with very the preferred option within the company now he's very one of the things that Julian wanted was a fairly evocative style wasn't really suited to manufacture using our very system we've been using that system since the elite it's a very low labor intensive system gives a good quality of panel but a lot of the features Julian wanted around the headlights on the rear of the car the rear spoiler rear lamp area didn't lend itself to using very styling as usual and Julian Thompson will hate me for saying it again but they always do try and push the right to the edge of the envelope they always want the lights in almost an illegal position they always produce shapes which the body process people hate because it compromises their process the body panels team had no alternative but to build the complex sectional molds which are used in the more labor-intensive and therefore more expensive hand lay process [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] with the hand little being in sections although it does allow us to produce its complex shapes it does give us a problem as every time those sections are removed there is a chance of damage to the joints between the sections which leads to repairs in the paint shop of the finished component and requires that the tool is serviced on a regular basis the project team has been made up but several people who have not been all the way through a program before they have brought a certain amount of lateral thinking into the program and it's been quite frustrating at times to try and explain to them that if they stuck to their original disciplines and perhaps listen to the people who've been through the body processes or the manufacturing processes before in their time at Lotus that life would be a lot easier a few months later the first set of hand finished painted body panels were ready for fitting to prototype number three [Music] the clay model does give you a very good idea but the cars can burn like but it ultimately can't tell you the whole story you had to see the car in paint Glasson and everything to get the whole picture a much larger car company of a lot more resource they'd be repaired to make a show car or a running car and then who didn't like it they could go backwards and start again we didn't have that luxury because of the time frame as much as anything so we were very committed to this first car we built and so once it was a ball to the other like technicians and push down to the sunlight that was it he wasn't like it was sort of tough fortunate we did like it it was much smaller than expected clay always because it's a horrible sort of sludge colored Brown always it always looks much bigger than that she is much heavier the car looks a lot more elegant and certainly the way the surfaces works and I have a light fell on it it was reserved better than I expected it for excitement as it was a very quick good moment for us computer programmes predicted that the m1 11 would accelerate from nought to 60 in 5.9 seconds and have a top speed of over 125 miles an hour now it was time to develop the performance of the real race car for the road [Music] by some in 1995 the ride and handling engineers were having a strong influence over the m1 Elevens development here tire testings the excuse for a spin on the motor industry research associations skid pan [Music] [Music] and I talk about some vehicle weight issues we've had we're running into increasing problems in the way the vehicle is just going up and up and up and the closest we get to production we just seem to be any more bit some more weight and unfortunately it's a standard thing when things go wrong or fail we end up adding weight during the fix rather than deleting it the target weight for the car is 650 kilos we've agreed that or we made the change is going to doors etc etc currently we're looking like 703 kilos so we're at 50 kilos overweight and we need to find some means of getting rid of that weight so what I'd like to do today is can we talk about some areas where you think we can save some weight the only ideas do worth going through these and a function codes starting off with glass body parts glass windscreens about the minimum thickness the size and wall thickness is a formal so what is stopping us down silence among sounded the ages getting thinner and thinner and it's hard to form and you'll get distortions in it right but the the other issues we got on the sauna channel and so I was looking at three more glass that rather than downsizing they think of them they'll end up too flexible they worth looking at it possible I think it could be a cost increase I can't think of anything apart from a hollow gear knob which is gonna make the chassis systems lighter and that's not likely as the way it's gone out and if anything I think is gonna be out and that's the gross vehicle weight has gone up we're gonna end up with having to put extra weight in to compensate was that everything has been designed around the original target was was 575 we're now too so I expect more weight in the rear subframe on the basis that the easiest way to save weight on a car is to look at the heavy bits the brake discs on the car seem to be a good area to focus our attention Lotus began searching for a third strategic partner this time in the United States where concerns about emissions and fuel economy are forcing all motor manufacturers to reduce vehicle weight they joined forces with the Lang side corporation a technology company which was developing a revolutionary material for brake discs a blend of aluminium and ceramics this program went together very quickly for an automobile something like 20 months or something from the conception to first production so it was a fast moving program and that too interested it's a lot we're interested to get our materials into the commercial marketplace as soon as we can as soon as reasonably practicable and so that had a lot of appeal to us too we started to do together explore the possibility that perhaps we could put on this vehicle metal-matrix were lightweight brake discs on all four wheels and that's very much at first some vehicles have been designed where the rear wheels are using MMC the materials but this is the first vehicle that's designed really to employ lightweight brake materials on all four wheels materials are lightweight they have other advantages they're also very wear resistant and so whereas a normal brake disc brake drum would be made of iron the ferrous material and that material would normally wear over time the pads would work the brake pads acting on that material would wear it away slowly but they would wear it away these materials brake in a very different way the brake pad coats the disc with really a transfer coating a layer and the braking action comes from that transfer layer and once that transfer layer is established the wear rate of the disc is very very low at least conceptually we could see a disc lasting the life of the car or a hundred thousand miles one branch of our technology allows us to make a composite material which under a certain restricted set of conditions can be cast just like steel or iron or aluminum would be cast in a relatively conventional foundry we made the prototype disks here using a sand casting technique where we make a sand mold which is the reverse of the shape we want pour into that sand mold composite molten aluminum containing reinforcements allow it to harden within the mold and then breaking the mold open and allowing us to take out fine apart a second US company became involved in preparing the NMC discs for Lotus hydraulics a part of a massive company which supplies brake parts to motor manufacturers and consumers they also believe that lightweight aluminium components are their future there is increased pressure on lighter weight vehicles there always has been I believe there always will be into the future when that next oil crisis comes whenever that is there will be a lot of pressure to go to eliminate as much cast iron as possible and the sprung weight of cast iron products like drums or discs will be a great candidate to reduce that way the metal matrix discs which may eventually be developed to last the lifetime of a car and also very difficult to machine hydraulics had to invest heavily in diamond tooling just to supply the prototype parts we don't look at the program as a program where we're looking to make a lot of money and quite the contrary we look at it as an Rd program we are involved in new technology that many of the other major brake rotor disk manufacturers are not involved in and the Lotus is one of the first programs that is actually going to market we as a very progressive and growing company wanted to be at the very forefront of that technology and believe that that that will be where the growth will be for us in the future in these various niche markets like the Lotus program at the Lotus Factory in Norwich the team developing the m1 11 had grown I would like to make that an option if possible so we passenger-side there was a foot press there then that would impinge on him but that was taking the rest of his days ride and handling experts were now at project meetings bringing feedback from the test track those who'd be responsible for building the assembly line were also involved as were those who still had to source nearly 2,000 production parts for the car the head of design Julian Thompson who originally styled the em1 11 found himself defending his concept now that people with the practical responsibility of putting the car into production were involved well we've we've always been underdogs I mean there's always been another company catcher there's always been a battle between engineers and starless they'd like to call us their groups together the hairdresser's the rest of it [Music] the way engineers approach problem that's been very much more mathematical and logistical and aesthetics doesn't really enter into it for them I mean if you see a car an engine is done his own you ought to see these things have done and they're just awful looking that doesn't matter them I mean I've I've often said that the average cleaning lady's got a better sense of aesthetics than an engineer and it's certainly true it's very difficult to find engineers who are good engineers but also have got a good eye for what is aesthetically pleasing Colin Chapman certainly did there were some engineers if noted Stanley Richard Rackham [Music] raggedly engineer was best man at Thompson's wedding our backgrounds are totally different Julia's background is I understand tired royalty you know they sent from that sort of line I'm from working-class Norfolk background or similar backgrounds and that we both had a very moralistic upbringing for fun I used to when I was a kid I had had a Meccano which was great set me up for life well this pirate flag used to be on my chimney to help people find my house is in the country and no one could ever find it through the house name so I stuck the flag up there I'm actually related to a pirate called Calico Jack Rackham now he was actually killed in 1792 by the wall Navy when they attacked his ship the Royal Navy found two women on board which is pretty strange for a pirate ship one died in the battle aw shortly after orders have say the other one died in and the other one gave birth to a baby and when she was in prison from that baby I spring now the woman got on to Jack calico ship by pretending to be a man so she was a transvestite so I've got a spring from a line of transvestites and pirates and that's not bad is it down here this is where all started for me with mechanical things apart from a Meccano of course which I had when I was five this is the first engine this is a cycle master which is used to used to buy these in the 50s put take the wheel out of your push bike and stick this in instead for some number plates on and off you went I found this when I was 11 or 12 on a bonfire on the beach at California cliffs in Norfolk I fixed it up remember the petrol tank had been so much heat that the solder in the tank together had melted and there's just a big bubble of solder in the back back of the tank so I guess she's stoked this is this is topical of this one it's stuck together with our diet which my brother gave me it doesn't lead to this day what are we go right this this motorbike is a sunbeam s7 it's a design classic this is the sort of motorbike that you saw in the Christmas cracker when you're a little boy it's got big tires it's got great proportion all the the mudguards are really rounded you know everything flows into each other the there's unique design features on it don't go into too much detail but you've got a cast cast aluminium silencer sharp drive the car type gearbox and clutch they're two cylinders inline just like an old car engine you got a distributor on the back of the overhead camshaft like a car the generator is right on the crankshaft line let's just just full of it I don't know you're supposed to read the ammeter though you have to look under your leg when you go on a long it's it was a revolution really the guy who designed it Ireland pop unfortunately went too far with a single mindedness and it cost him his job because this was very expensive to produce full of unique features but they were also new to the manufacturer they didn't couldn't keep up with it there was too much too soon but now it's quite desirable I think I think probably the most difficult period in the in the whole process was really trying to resolve some issues over the windscreen design and which was very very difficult and caused a lot of grief to put it bluntly the problem was that it was thought that a screen of that shape and curvature couldn't be wiped with a single wiper because the whatever has to wipe has to go completely around the corners of the screen I really wanted there to be a central single wiper the reason for this is it's the most efficient aerodynamic setup you can have and it's very cheap and it looks racy you know you look any group see car and as a single wiper in the middle gone like crazy we didn't want it Pat pantograph I but you didn't have to want to have two wipers but there are some very very heavy legal restrictions on what you have to do you have to take vision lines from the occupant they pass through the screen and a certain percentage of that area the occupant looks through has to be wiped if you have a very curved screen and you have a single wiper it's difficult but unfortunately you know some our engineers would like to design wiper systems divert any car and they weren't they weren't willing to look at different solutions and really it comes down to putting a job in a tiny bit to refight something there was a screen with the as a plastic screen with all the wiped areas denoted areas that we had to wipe denoted on it and I went out one day and put a Citroen ax system on it and declared it could work with a single wiper what I did is I tilted the wiper motor spindle slightly and in relation to the screen and that and that's made it they made it possible maybe it was user actually holding a wiper motor and having having the parts in my hand that made me realize I could happen I'm sure that other people could have seen that as well had they had the part in their hand at the time [Music] at Millbrook testing of the heavily disguised prototypes continued in secret but one motoring journalist Jeremy Walton was allowed an exclusive preview of the m1 11 steering is truly delicate truly like the original Earl and magnificent now this morning this cars been through 20 stops from a hundred and five miles an hour to about 50 miles an hour so anything I'm going to do is find lenient on it eternal cash so what's the best thing to do you're saying well if if this guy let me will will back down to I can't go forward so if we back down towards a flat section that seems to fix the problem [Laughter] [Music] the engineers tell me that going to Stowe vo to do great testing is essential and I've never been myself but when I see the photographs I think maybe the the location that says it already it's obviously a very nice place to go [Applause] it is an industry standard particularly for driving down hills with caravans and so on the car where the cars go very slowly and the weight of the trailer or whatever is pushing the car down you can find you can lose brakes when you get to the bottom because we're using new technology it's very important that we've proven that we've gone to Stovall and that they will survive all those sort of tests [Music] [Music] one of the big details that I was rememberin is this this really no runoff area so if you do mr. JIT beautiful quite easily end up down the bottom of the valley but when you're driving down there you're always mindful as well as driving as hard as you can trying to give the the brakes as much grief as possible you were also in the back of your mind looking out for any signs that a woman warned you of a possible failure because we are talking about prototype parts it's a very very harsh environment the gradient and the twists that you find in this particular location rig absolutely havoc with the brakes [Music] [Applause] [Music] and the idea ready is to go as fast as you can and as safely as you can and using the brakes as much as you can and then you record all the data and then you review it and you find out exactly what's happened to the right have they overheated is there any what we call pad not back so that the the pad moves away from the disk do you find that the the fluid boils and that's something which absolutely astounded us other cars that we've taken down there when we get down to the bottom and the heat from the caliper soaks in to the brake fluid then you start getting a loss of brake pedal there was none of that thought because the brakes run at relatively cool temperatures what we wanted to do that was make sure that the the system worked that the brakes were going to be acceptable for this sort of car so we weren't really concerned about the design that much but we were concerned about the application we came back from salvia with a wither with a very warm feeling for the breaks in its in its application because we we felt that we proved out that the application worked on the car in its harshest environment but the results we found it's dalvio is that the disk runs relatively low temperature compared to a cast iron disc and that really was quite surprising because the MMC dissipates the heat so quickly that running some of the most arduous brake tests that we carry out in Europe particularly the Nurburgring where typically we'll be getting six to 700 degrees centigrade on the the Nordschleife a circuit with this particular disc we only reach about 210 degrees and that's only just a warm disc basically and that's got huge advantages in terms of of where and again I think it's possible may not be on the car at the moment but in the future to make the pad and the disc glass of the life of the car 100,000 miles designer Richard Rackham was discovering the true potential of aluminium extrusions components made by squeezing heated aluminium through a complex die he'd used them in the chassis but found they provided simple elegant solutions to other design issues on the car you don't think about these two parts will come together then we'll put a bolt through there and a screw you think about can we make these two extrusions hook together and do away with the fixings you look at in individual parts and think could they be an extrusion [Music] [Music] the greatest thing was when I was working on their package looking at the pedals trying to fit a metro pedal box in the car which looked hideous was big was heavy I'd sketched out an ideal pedal shape and the side and suddenly I I saw an extrusion there and that was that was great but if I hadn't been tuned into extrusion it'll never have happened [Music] I think the pedals caught a lot of people's imagination it's it's something which people everybody can identify with because whatever you know about cars you know you put on a pedal so that that's one reason the other reason is it is something which is easily held in the hand it's got a nice kirby shape to it and it's got a clever sort of pad which goes on Julien actually wants to turn one into a telephone thinks we should send them off to clients and that's the Lotus thing Tony shoot he's had you know dozens of them made up just to give away I'm really pleased it's taken off like that many of the larger extrusions are made by Hyder Ali minam in Denmark these are the main side rails for the Lotus chassis normally after being formed extrusions are cuts length then cured at high temperature to protect and strengthen the aluminium but the side rails for the m1 11 needs to be bent so they can't be cured immediately and as there isn't a press in Denmark which is big enough to bend them they're shipped to England Bend they're then shipped all the way back to hydro motors became concerned about quality controls and hydros lack of progress with the new unit it was setting up to manufacture the m1 11 chassis Quality Assurance engineer Peter Wainwright was sent to the Danish suppliers the result of the first visit was from our point of view quite disappointing thing that we'd come to to Denmark we'd found that there's basically an empty shell of a factory a few offices very few people no real control systems and the company that's got no experience of the job that we want them to do so over that summer every time we made a visit it became more apparent that things shall we say in inline with a normal time in plan that you have for a project weren't being achieved they set up the automotive structure division a few years ago because they could see that aluminium would become more relevant in the automotive world suddenly they've got two projects with they've come to fruition it's the Lotus project the bonded structure and the structure for the Renault Spyder which is a conventional welded structure in the past they've had projects with it had come to nothing but suddenly these are both taken off so suddenly they've had to build a factory they have to put in place all the people to make the manufacturing process work and that's something they know nothing about must been a very difficult time for them the real problems I think became noticeable when they weren't being able to deliver things and it was starting to threaten the rest of the project it was planned to launch the car at the London Motor Fair and mr. arty only our our boss came along and said he'd like to launch the car at Frankfurt because he wanted a more international forum which was understandable which was fine but it was only four weeks before the show I took him into the workshop and showed him the pile of parts that was the show car and it was really a bit nervous because you can't half commit yourself to going to a Motor Show you either go there or you don't go there and so we sort of said well we're certainly do our very best so we had four weeks to build a car up to show standard and we achieved it just I think choosing the the name for the vehicle was taking longer than it was actually designing and developing the car as always traditionally Lotus cards have begun either with an e such as he'll an eclair inand vehicles like that or with the type name they're very close to the launch mr. RT early and decided it should be named after his granddaughter and I think the names actually fitted very very well and I think it got received universally and in the company now people have learned to pronounce it because the chassis is the key to this vehicle I should like to ask the team and in fact if you could move away a little bit I should like to ask the team to unveil this chassis display first I wanted to look as good as possible we had a special chassis put together a Hydra with without too much adhesive showing we had a suspension system chrome-plated I actually designed the stand for which was a very lightweight looking thing you know the chassis support on three slender nickel-plated rods with tension and wires between like you might find on a an aircraft an old aircraft it's the first time to show the car to your peers you know the design community in Europe is very very small and we know only know each other and done when you design a car it's been sitting in front of your desk for two years you really can't evaluate it you can't really know what it's about [Music] and he put a thing on this and it sort of really a matter of what do you think and how that point in time your own opinions is very very confused so you're listening out for every single snip it up people is saying good and bad and dissecting everyone minutely and analyzing it far too much and says it was quite nerve-wracking for me [Music] please so like a little bit of rivalry that really they're Ginoza people looking at the car how many are looking at the car how many looking at this chassis owners I wasn't surprised but a lot of people surprised by how much interest was in this chassis as most designers like to think themselves being engineers they're all coming up and saying oh yeah great chassis so I could have done the body better sort of thing that was very much so it's great for Richard but I wasn't going for me what do I think of the car I think it's probably faster than I expected for something which is said to be a load of seven replacement but it's not my styling you should be success well I think it's great great concept there's a lot of the cars that I got no distinct personality but this is very unique looking let's assume very affordable strange [Music] um it's curiously styled it's cute yes I want one it's a wireless because Elise is my big love that is born when is born this car is my granddaughter ELISA so I am ELISA and she is born when he's born this car the show car at Frankfurt was miles away from a finished car it looked pretty good but it's not tested the durability has not been done all the body panels have had a lot of hand finishing on them they weren't off production tools and getting the car from that stage into a production vehicle is very frustrating because the finance people can't see there's any work to do no the car is finished in reality when you got to that stage I a show car you've probably done 30% of the project and to actually get all the tools and so on ready to roll so they that you can start throwing them out like peas out of a pod is is very very complex and very involved and there were a lot of issues that still weren't ready to commit the car to production the amount of work we now had to get from the show car to production was enormous [Music] [Music] getting into production was to be the most difficult and frustrating stage of the Lotus sports car project it began with major design changes and delays and ended with a dramatic ballroom battle when the whole future of car production at Lotus seemed under threat this is the final phase of project M 111 [Music] [Music] by February 1996 two prototypes were pounding the tracks of Millbrook it's a top-secret Proving Ground in Bedfordshire where schools of motor manufacturers test new cars to destruction away from the prying eyes of the press and the public we have obviously a lot of experience on testing cars not only our own product but other people's product and we have a very very wide database of what cars must do if they're going to be successful when they go out to the public and we know that if a car doesn't meet some of these requirements we can't sign it off and we're going to have huge warranty problems so all our cars go through a very rigorous test which is not dissimilar to the major manufacturers worldwide and the unfortunate thing about this with the number of cars we make the cost of the testing is just the same as for the body manufacturers and the detail that we have to go in for each of the parts is just the same Mel Brooks 300 acre site is torture for new vehicles it's dominated by a circular two-mile track for prolonged high speed testing and Alpine Hill roofs designed to thrash gearboxes and brakes and on other parts of the track special road surfaces which mimic the most severe battering a customer could ever give to the suspension and structure of a car you build your first prototype and you run it around the yard it feels wonderful you run it around the track feels even better and do a few more checks it's still good you then send it to Millbrook they run it for a week and something breaks the potholes are a severe force when the vehicle has to contend with as the car approaches the pothole the tire will first of all drop with the road surface and the car will start to lower itself and then you will hit the far end of the pothole which will punch the tire in the wheel back into the bodywork very sizable bang I'd rather not tell you how often we do it because that's a part of our technological property if you like the durability test documents the deterioration that a car will see over the accelerated type of forces that we put through the car so Lotus would start off with a fresh vehicle we would inspect it to make sure we knew its condition and start of test precisely let me then start running it to render it as secondhand as we thought necessary and inspect it all the way through the jet so every had an exact measure of how quickly it was deteriorating design engineers might get into the trap of fooling themselves but they haven't got a problem or that the problem is a proving ground only problem eventually a paying customer and will find that problem that's what durability testing was about back at Lotus project manager Tony shoots was briefing a team from rover engine supplies to the Lotus Elise why the Elise basically we had identified a need to go back to a low cost Lotus that's low cost in Lotus terms not in Ford terms we wanted a car to go back to basics a fun car the sort of car that you'd own to go fiddling with at the weekend to tinker with we're looking at something that's a serious toy not a to be transport the basic price of the car we'll be sending this less than 20,000 pounds and yet we're writing off all the engineering investment over just two and a half thousand cars or there abouts true to Lotus heritage simple do we need four wheels and tires do we need a spare wheel and tire you know why do you need trim down the side of the car the structure on the front of the car is a crash structure but why can't it be a support for the radiator why can't it be an aerodynamic wing why can't it be where the tow hook goes on it needs to do many many things that way you can eliminate lots of parts which means you don't have to design them and you'd have to pay for them and you reduce the weight when the Elise was unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show in October 1995 it looked as though the super-lightweight sports car was ready for production but it was just a show car a glossy and built prototype four months later when the assembly line began to take shape in the Lotus Factory major design issues were still unresolved and hundreds of plants were missing technicians were supposed to build for prototype cars to learn how and in what sequence that could be put together but with the design still fluid it was almost impossible but two weeks ago when we came onto the line we had very very few parts the chassis came in light so we had to do what we could sub assembling parts that came in in advance it's very difficult to get any sort of controlled build when you have to build a car out of sequence the part supply situation can be quite frustrating when we the lads on the line are trying to help out and get the inspector the car together and we pull the relevant paperwork out find out what the fixings are good to great lengths to find a part numbers going good to the rack and then find they're not here yet I think we have a lot of parts missing because the program is very short in terms of car design to production we've had a few odd holdups along the way as with any program and the design is still fluid keeping pace with the design changes is very very difficult and I feel what we should do and certainly we don't here and I don't think many many companies do we should have a real solid design freeze but in reality this doesn't doesn't happen because you get parts that have to be re-released for safety issues legal reasons cost issues suppliers go down the pan you know there there are 101 reasons why is always a reason to change your part and often it's also used as an excuse to improve the part where we realized that maybe it wasn't a hundred percent in the first place but the current time I would say we're about four weeks late on completing the first car we're all prepared to work extra timers need be to get the project and it you know it means everything to us it's our future the manufacturing team were forced to use a lot of slave parts to complete this car for the Geneva Motor Show dummy or substitute parts which would eventually be replaced with a real thing keeping track of nearly 2,000 parts was proving a logistical nightmare the most significant part is 118 but no supplier identified yeah those are items that at the moment we're still not sure on a lot of those will be new parts coming onto the list where I just have a description and as yet I can't really follow that up good inquiries again some of those may be deleted at a later date you know parts come off the list as far as they go on at times but so how's he doing there I don't know they're not the difficult business and now there are some do a lot of the door components are in there exactly we're still working on those we can't actually order them there's a few seals and things like that a few sales abusively thanks simple extrusions the shortage of paths was beginning to delay car production and the pressure was mounting for the parts buyers like Dave Smith he'd sourced some header tanks but it seemed his suppliers had stopped trading and closed the doors of the factory Dave called on his network of contacts for help I'm okay going and he knows on headed tanks yeah you got a problem on supply now yeah so it's into the into the rare and rocking-horse category is it to deal with it well I think all they wanted I'll ring Rover up and find out what the situation is ladies from there and because if anybody's gonna know okay Mike so the 12 we got is what we're getting and we better get going again quick yeah okay I might kiss okay not solved you can tell from his body language if things aren't going too well and sometimes I feel quite sorry for the person at the end of the phone and almost feel like phoning them up and saying we don't worry you know it's like that with everybody but he's been kind of character also his knowledge of areas of the product and which we didn't have before has been very very useful generally we've concentrated on the major items in cars he has a tremendous knowledge of the other little bits and pieces which are so essential to make a vehicle total totally complete the part spires were also working to incredibly tight budgets which called for some careful manipulation of those mainly the styling team whose tastes were a little expensive I spoil the party all the time because I keep telling I can't afford what I want you have to use a bit of your craft you know if you've got the component where maybe it needs a sexy finish on and you've had it done one way and it's cost to clean your anything done another why can it cost a fiver you put the one that cluster fiber in your pocket and say it's gonna look like this lads and then you get what you want and they're not disappointed because I don't think they can get anything better in March the Elise was ready for it's official top speed and naught to 60 products at Millbrook okay here you can see the the lights Corvette system it's it produces the light which shines on to the ground and as soon as you start off it permitted speed and distance and this is all connected through these wires into the lights box of tricks which is operated by the laptop computer it's the first time I've used this laptop on here I would have to see how it goes [Music] everything right well I don't know it's a bit confusing that there's only really flashing 4.2 miles an hour can I tell you this is gonna be problems it seems okay except that looking down at the screen when you're doing it that's showing about 4.2 miles an hour well it sometimes shows three miles an hour and you're doing 120 [Music] [Applause] how'd you know we still not got a lot of luck because making this silly noise again and the speeds just as consistent as they were last time and then we're near the speeds that we're doing it seems to me there's some sort of conversion fact that we're missing here software problem it's a software problem for children which is well as far as we go after borrowing some different equipments from Millbrook engineers they've Minton and a third attempt at measuring the cars acceleration from nought to 60 that's more like it five point eight one I believe that much better 217 so what we know what was wrong they couldn't me about the quipment that's the way you push the button it's flashing you just go yeah if this does it I was pushing it again then going after you know what I was doing is taking time from when I when I'm willing to start flashing one five eight five three consistently whilst at night [Music] but anyways pretty good and so many runs about ones it was very cool be able to take the boxing fans low yeah [Music] [Music] an afternoon on mill Brooks high-speed track ended in good news a top speed of 127 miles per hour but there were no celebrations for another member of the team at the chassis supplies in Denmark oh I just want to get on the first flight out of it anyway expect you when I get back any more detail Otis has had to join forces with a number of other companies to develop the Elise most of these strategic partnerships have worked very well is that you have to be slightly athletic to get in and out the car and develop a technique and it's very interesting I went to the Motor Show on one of the sunday they took my family up and I stood out in the crowd and just listening to the comments and there's this poor old guy trying to get into the car on the stand I mean he was he was really in dead trouble and the guy who was down in front of me turned his mate and said I thought it's too old to be getting in one of those so have any questions I'll be delighted to try and answer them what were the key factors in actually the selection that rode the power train for your product basically size and weight I believe that the rover k-series is the lightest four-cylinder powertrain unit on the market and I would say cost but it's turned out to be so expensive that Rover is far more process orientated far more concerned about doing things very correctly and Lotus is much more on the edge on the edge of technology on the edge of failure maybe so getting the cultures right between the two companies the relationship has been quite a challenge yeah we had quite a few jollies various locations in the country I think there was one particular one where we had to basically form teams and their joint teams Lotus and Rover and we had to build this thing that looked like a roller coaster and design it and planet and then come and build it the following day to a set of instructions with a minimum amount of material and I remember the people who ran this management course when we came in the next day with our inventory of what we needed to build this thing they just shook their heads and said it's totally impossible it's a third of the amount of stuff that anybody's ever used to do this before and and we achieved it quite comfortably and within the time and basically we did that by reading the rules in a different way to anybody else having read them hydro aluminium in Denmark a major partners in the élysée project they're experts in producing aluminium components but have only recently set up this factory to build whole vehicle chassis x' the lotus chassis components are formed by squeezing billets of soft heated aluminium through a complex die to form extrusions the parts Lotus designed have pushed the process to its limits and a problem seemed to have arisen at the point where a new billet of aluminium joins the one already in the press discoloration at the join was then squeezed through the length of the extrusion and could be seen when extrusion was sliced into individual components the effect known as charge welds was explained to project manager Tony shoot by chassis engineer Daryl Greg and the problem is characterized really by the change in colour don't if you can see that little change in colour just here between this area of the extrusion and the general extrusion around here and here so I'm worried about this because it could represent a weak point in the extrusion if indeed it is shown that we have a charged world effect locally that's the first I've ever heard of this phenomena and is it significant well it's the first time that hydro have seen such extensive charge worlds through running through their extrusions right and they're asking us the question is this okay and I think we're turning the question around and asking them to provide evidence of of the microstructure of these areas and telling us whether it's okay or not in Denmark Peter Wainwright had been having a frustrating time problem-solving at the hydro Factory in March he ran his boss in desperation 12 in Nandi hey how you doing pretty bad where me I think I'll come for the end they're just I'm just not getting through to these people I'm just getting so frustrated this uh that's just causing me grief yeah yeah I'm just getting fed up uh sorta like telling people or advising I'm not trying to help them to do something I take it on board girl why when you check a couple days later I haven't done it I still believe that there's a communication and counter problem there are differences with Scandinavian culture and English or Western Europe and I certainly feel they're out there having communication problems there must have been this but now don't I mean I don't to dump it on someone else but perhaps it's an option you know I let someone else are we going to see if they can see you you're the first parent always but perhaps we need present yeah okay well you come back as soon as you can get me details to your flight when you've around to do well I'll need to speak to Maxine okay no I just want to get on the first flight out of it right then we expect you want to get back so they know more detail jeez after a couple of weeks break Peter returned to Denmark to see chassis production steadily improve hydro aluminium have declined to be interviewed about the latest project in the United States the Lange side corporation had developed revolutionary lightweight brake discs for the Elise very late in the program Lotus discovered cracks in the discs which are made from a mixture of aluminium and ceramics only a redesign and expensive retooling would solve the problem the Lotus disk is in its second design the first design was a very flat to fit within the envelope afforded by the car the breaking plates and the hub are very much in the same plane this causes something of a problem when the friction is being applied to the brake plate and the break plates try to expand this expansion causes stresses in the hub and so this particular design develops quite high stresses in the in the hub area the redesign which joins the hub to the other brake plate so that there is a hat or an offset within the disc this allows the brake plates to expand and does not pray place too much stress on the hub in in the hot condition and this is a solution which stays within the envelope of the car allows for some offset and eliminates the high stress situation in the hub we made the prototype disks here using a sand casting technique and currently that's the product we're providing to load we have a view a vision of the future if you like that a better process a better a better way of achieving the final product is not to cast the mixture into a shape but to take the ceramic or the reinforcing elements of the of the composite form them to shape and then introduce the aluminum just into that shape by this process by which we call infiltration and this molten metal infiltration process allows us to have the shape of the disk which is very close to its final form introduced the metal and finish up at the part that these very little machine may be not in the in the final design the final vision of this perhaps no machining except a smoothing of the braking surface itself [Music] in March Dave minta and Tony shoot took two cars on a long drive over 1,000 kilometers to the French ski resort of Shama knee a base for some what's delayed winter testing in the Alps [Music] Oh for my aspect I don't often get the opportunity to spend a reasonable amount of time in the car I think if you're not very careful you end up doing short trips in Norfolk 20 minutes half an hour and you miss an awful lot of what's going on with the vehicle you have to put yourself in the picture of a potential customer driving it in Norfolk or just snow for driving for an hour at a time you don't live with the car and it's important to be able to live with the car can I get the bags in can I you know what's annoying I can't find anywhere to put this particular form of sunglasses when I'm driving along things like that make the car a good car it's considered very much as a sporting type car and maybe not very practical but I'm not sure that's the case actually turned out to be a lot more practical than I was expecting they were done like a thousand kilometers in a day or we do two and a half thousand in four days and it's very very comfortable it's quick and it's very very fuel-efficient which is good we actually averaged as discussing yesterday with Dave 50 to the gallon over a hundred mile section of the autoroute history and a constant or averaging 65 miles an hour that's not really a reason for the car but it's kind of interesting and if nothing else it means you don't have to stop so often to fill up [Music] [Music] the right differences between the two car what's your impression of a yellow car this poor very far and what aspect this is the harshness levels really because the the tires on that are better than the summer tires so what Tama tires are not going to be even worse and that's the worrying thing that I was talking to you about when we went to do with the performance tester where'd you get into this car and the isolation is much better that's for all half points better so that's come with the change the plastic bushes if that's theirs when it when it's been rebuilt during the last week that's changed completely and the first thing we do is actually measure them in the wishbone that's the only way yes check exactly what each car has got and whether we end up putting those which plans on there I mean it's just a mega amount of work again isn't it very much so yeah and the cars off the road again no the other problem this cars got is this sort of not rattled from the back yes not under the extreme bumps but under sort of into any about yes yeah it's it sounds like you can imagine the bush housing on the damper hitting the amount yes yes yeah I'm sure it's not happening because we've checked at so many times no witness box no witness but that's exactly this sound that you'd hear okay I'm also wondering when there's not some body work that's bottoming out like the bottle at the doors or the clamshell or whatever well certainly on that car there's a lot of body work noise vibrations and crashing through and a body work and I know that when you drove the car around without the clam shells on it saying actually that was quite quiet it was well then you did use it for a couple of laps okay I didn't even know it any difference there we drove up and down the yard and it was quite good yeah it's a bit too extreme that the doors I think what I'd like to do is drive this car without the rear clamp channel to get rid of this get rid of that yeah see what happens because it's still there because you'll get it on the surco off the circuit it's Hethel yeah it's exactly that sort of input more design changes meant more delays and more frustrations on the assembly line where seven pilot cars were being built as a kind of rehearsal for proper production building these cars were supposed to help the manufacturing team set at a system which would deliver the right parts to the right point on the line at the right time we're now into the pilot build phase which is going to enable to train the operators and to I know any bugs in the line we've now completed the first of the seven cars which is short of parts because we haven't got parts into the light that specification due to design changes that we've found from problems in build and that we haven't got new parts in from the suppliers yet it's around 120 parts short on the first red car some of the parts have had to be redesigned because of fit problems where parts don't fit together as they've been designed we find that people that work on different systems on the car may be on body or chassis haven't talked to each other enough and put parts in each other's way so you can't fit two parts in the same place obviously it's very difficult very frustrating to try and drag the parts out of people you know they don't seem to realize the importance you know see the cars dribbling down the line as if it were another phase of pre-production build they don't seem to realize that we're under great pressure out here to build cars if we slip those three weeks now that's gonna be 60 cars we lose off the end of the year when we're building it at 20 a week now it's obviously a big big revenue to the company so there's a lot of pressure for us to get into production now but you know we can't do it without parts good Morgana's can Lotus okay another big issue we have with the car before we can sell it is it has to be type approved it has to meet the the legal requirements for each of the countries now for a lease principally we're looking at the European markets also Australia and Japan but not the USA so we have to meet all those requirements now one of the the positive things that's come out of the the EEC is they've now got a universal regulation whereby if you can get Type Approval into one country and that applies to all the other countries within the community now we've elected to do this in Holland and because they were involved in the project from from day one [Applause] well I have to carry out the rules of course and if it doesn't comply with the regulation it has a non-compliance and the work has to be done again or but doing this work is always a cooperation between a manufacturer and and that the testing facility and I think our goals may be a bit different because I want the car to fulfill the requirements and the manufacturer wants the certificates with as little effort as possible of course because it's cost money [Music] this is the first car that motors have done also one of the first cars in the motor industry that has gone through this complete type approval process it's a very intensive program very expensive as well so you need to get it right and right first time as well as carrying out their own detailed examination of the lease the Dutch authorities studied film of crash tests which took place in England there's a series of crash tests but the main one is the 30 mile an hour barrier test where the car is run up to 30 miles an hour and driven into a solid piece of concrete and then this is filmed with very high speed cameras and you analyze what moves and what happens on the tests and you measure the deceleration of the occupants and other bits and pieces in the car and we were very pleased with the performance of the car because effectively we could just take off the front crash structure just delaminate it and bond on a new one and we could have driven the car back to Lotus and Ethel this car is particularly aimed at motorsport and it's not unknown when you go racing to have accidents the actual crash structure at the front which is a sacrificial part you can just unbond and stick a new part on so those sort of repairs are relatively low-cost and even for the the owner who enjoys working on his own car some of these tasks are not beyond his his capabilities for sure another problem is further down his line as soon as you come here it only touches the surface yeah well that was our Channing that'll actually be blunted very to this stainless steel screen right the strip which is used for attaching the soft top was considered too dangerous production Spector ordered a design change how diverse can even say I'm over RDW in the Netherlands sure just got a small problem we got any exterior projections of this vehicle at the moment really yeah well you know the steel strip that goes along the top of the windscreen header oil yeah the retainer for the soft top sure although we have very just the aged smoothed off the edge of that strip sure it's not really as good as as it could be it's not complying yeah that's it we'll have a look at it and I'm just understand your problem a bit bit closer in detail we got a time constraint on this and what I would like to do is I want to present the the RDW with a positive view of how we're gonna fix it by when do you need to know for any morning then at least I could give some sort of positive idea of what we're gonna be doing okay right then I'll do that I've got your number so we'll we'll be back to you tomorrow morning and hopefully see the best way of resolving resolving problem okay by June hydro in Denmark were having much more success bonding or gluing the aluminium chassis x' when you walk through their production line they happen to be welding a structure for some for another client and you walk through and there's grinders going off and they're sparks flying and there's dirt and noise and muck and as you go through the factory you sort of quiet understand and there's a glass partition and they're people in there with white coats on gloves picking up the pre machined extrusions placing them into the assembly jig but applying the glue you know the pipeline the rivets and he's dead quite as peaceful he's you know it's a much nicer thing to do [Music] the energy required I think in the bonding process is a lot less the accuracy is much greater a very attractive thing for the rest of the automotive world the Elise is bonded aluminium chassis is an industry-first and it's created in unique almost clinical conditions the main priority is to prevent any airborne contaminants affecting the adhesive so the air pressure inside the production cell has to be kept higher than the rest of the factory so filtered air seeps out and contaminated air never seeps in Danish Health the safety laws demand that the epoxy based adhesive never comes into contact with skin so the technicians are forced to wear gloves and protective clothing the chassis is made from over 40 separate extrusions and when it's moved from the assembly jig the glue is still soft it doesn't harden or become safe to touch until the whole chassis has been cured in an oven at high temperatures for at least four hours Peter Wainwright who at one stage and serious concerns about the supply of chassés is now much more confident oh that I I believe things are over the top of the hill and we're skiing down the other side I mean we're in production now the supplier chasis is good the way a lot of people are working there is a lot better now now I mean back in March towards the end of March I did I couldn't see a why fault I want to see it through to the end there see the side rails back there now whether it was dipping down it's a lot more level round the back here that's good Lotus hopes the strength of its bonded chassis will convince other manufacturers that it's perfectly acceptable to glue cars together well I think it's how you portray it really I mean airplanes are glued together as you put it and nobody worries about flying off over to America with a wing that's glued onto a jumbo jet that's quite normal the same with racing cars I mean the racing car table is basically just glue and and a fiber and as we've seen from you know some of the accidents you see on television when Formula One the the integrity and strength of those tabs are just unbelievable so - for Lotus to bond I'm sure will lead to better things for Lotus when we are now a huge step ahead of anybody else and where our knowledge will be able to go on and make other cars more with more complex structures but this is a great starting point in June somewhat later than they'd been promised the motoring press finally got that chance to drive the Lotus Elise completed cars were still in short supply so there was no razzmatazz no glitzy press launch in the South of France just a chance to drive and photograph the car for a day in the countryside around the factory and in Norridge Lotus has never gone in for expensive advertising campaigns to promote its cars it knows that if new products live up to Lotus traditions of ride and handling the enthusiasm of motoring journalists like ray Hutton will promote the I wonder whether one of other people generally would would want to have a car that has so little room in it there the two of us are sitting there within our shoulders rubbing together and that might be quite nice for some people but I never ticularly want to do it with a photographer I'm just gonna finish off on the nose here okay badge and headlights etc that only has the same power as a the MGF Sun it's a good deal lighter and therefore considerably faster and brakes are extremely good as well but no servo I suppose that's part of the good response no power steering of course and we've all got we've all got used to that and then recent years and so to go back to something which is really a sort of rule basic sportscar but which is so well done it's really really fulfilling can I get you to tilt that turn mirror up yeah that's perfect not getting a picture of you in it as well and I'd like to have somewhere a little bit easier to put my briefcase or something if I was going to use one of them they did a basic but I suppose that's the point people aren't really most of them are gonna buying is the second car just can use for fun at the weekends and good luck to them very nice the Elise had unprecedented reviews in the motoring press autocar dubbed it the eighth wonder of the world car magazine infused its so fast so agile so pure and added the 21st century sports car is here now the press reviews led to a flurry of orders from customers and by the end of July 1300 people that put down 1,000 pound deposits on the car they had never seen in the flesh let alone rhythm one of the equations we've got to sort out very quickly is the question of supply and demand we originally underestimated I think the level of demand that there would be for this little car this year the first year of production of the car we were going to actually build just 400 cars of that 400 only 200 we're going to be for the UK so a tiny tiny number next year we were originally looking at building 900 cars again of which probably half were going to be for the UK market with the rest for mainland Europe and the Far East it now looks as though we have considerably underestimated that original production objective and our Chairman has recently stated that he's looking to increase production up to two and a half thousand vehicles a year moment we're producing one car a day down the assembly line we've got a few cars off the end of a line which are just waiting for the finishing touches before we can pass them off to the dealers we're currently training new staff so we can increase the volume to two per day at the end of next week following on from that we'll be going up to three and I am very soon after that four per day which is our maximum production rate we were very frustrated early on with the short program and light release of parts not being able to have the parts on line to build a car in sequence is very frustrating but at the end of a day we overcome the problems one way or another either by hand producing parts to get us you know of a model to see how things fit together before the production parts came in but yeah that's pretty good we've got a few little engineering issues to sort out but nothing that would stop us selling the car but two weeks before the first car was due for delivery to a customer the whole company was rocked by a boardroom revolt Lotus cars and the more profitable Lotus engineering division had been on the market for a year potential buyers had raised doubts about the future of car production in a bid to end the uncertainty for directors and the company secretary confronted the chairman Romano our CEO Lee all five of them were suspended when the Friday what happened was that the the board that we had decided to try and force the paste in terms of sale of the company and gave mr. RTO an ultimatum and mr. Archie only doesn't like ultimatums and responded on the Tuesday by bringing in a bunch of lawyers and effectively marching the north of premises it's typically noticed I mean there just never does things the easy way we've had this huge Bank of good publicity and we're on a roll and then suddenly we have this and I think it's just very character forming on August the first P registration day with the future of Lotus cars still hanging in the balance one of the country's oldest Lotus dealers in Surrey was given the opportunity to sell the first Elise to the first customer Lotus enthusiasts and driving examiner Jeff Prescott from an stylists point of view it's just a dream come true to see a product right through from first sketches right through to seeing a customer drive the first car away that's a real honor you sort of all did quite a long time ago didn't it's now 25 months I think yeah didn't even have a name for the car then didn't we knows no car no no no I remember the night and we have photograph from the car for the brochure the car was parked there and we weren't allowed to get near it because they were photographing it and so we only could stand back and look at it so spiritually as well and you know we suddenly realized we'd created much more of a carven would actually thought we're going to it was actually better than we thought it was gonna be it had more content it was more real as it was cleverer than we ever imagined it was very very satisfying yes thank you very much to release race two years ish from start to finish you know for cars coming down the line and I can't believe that his other car manufacturers it could turn it round that quickly I don't know it's been a struggle but that's what Louis is all about it's about innovation and keeping things small and doing it quickly giving the customer what they want I think the technology side of it is very significant in that we've learned so much from some of these bits and pieces I'd love to go into another car and who knows it might be an off-road vehicle might be a MPV or whatever but using this technology and that's where it's significant because we understand now the process of doing an iminium structures we understand how to design MMC brakes and how to do uprights and so on and they can apply to all sorts of vehicles I think it's another way of making a car at the end of project m 111 the Elise weighs in at 690 kilograms 2/3 the weight of a mini it boasts a top speed of 125 miles an hour and accelerates from naught to 60 in 5.7 seconds with an on-the-road price of under 20,000 pounds [Music] [Laughter] you [Music]

Channel: JODYN

Views: 1,302,440

Rating: 4.3348374 out of 5

Keywords: Sportscar, Rover, Lotus Elise, Lotus, Lotus Cars, Team Lotus

Id: a-TiFKr2yb0

Length: 140min 40sec (8440 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/juver3]

the level of bumble fuckery is unbelievable

[u/[deleted]]

What a 90's intro

[u/unhedged]

That's a fantastic documentary. It shows some of the inner workings that is not often seen on r/engineeringporn or automotive sites like, I don't know, speedhunters?- the compromises, the turf wars, the vision, passion.

The section about the guy having an aha!-moment with extrusions was amazing. Realising that the pedals and door hinges were milled from extrusions almost gave me goosebumps.

Five thumbs-up!

[u/franklindeer]

This Mclaren doc is very good also.

[u/The_edref]

That was a really good documentary. Thanks