The Next Lotus Elise Will Be Here In 2020

Having struggled in the aftermath of the disastrous, long since cancelled Danny Bahar five car plan, things are looking up at Lotus. The Norfolk sports car company is on track to make a profit in 2017, and if that happens it’ll be the first time the company has been in the black for 20 years.

The best news of all, though? A few years after that, we should be getting an all-new Elise. Speaking to Autocar, Lotus CEO Jean-Marc Gales said that the new Elise will be “ready in 2020,” by which point a new version will be well overdue - the current ‘Series 3’ model is already five years old and rides on a platform derived from the 20-year-old Series 1.

Gales didn’t reveal a whole lot else, but did drop a few hints about what the next Elise might be like. “We have invested a lot in the Toyota relationship and it is really successful,” was just one of the warm, cuddly things he directed at Toyota, so another powerplant from the Japanese manufacturer seems likely. Great steering feedback - a Lotus trademark - should continue too, with Gales stating: “We have steering that nobody else has matched…That is part of our company and we will never do anything that disrupts that.”

It’ll need to be a little wider than the current car to give room for better side impact protection plus side-mounted airbags, as it’ll need to comply with US crash regulations. Yep, this’ll be a Lotus you can buy both sides of the pond.

Whether or not Lotus can add all this extra stuff while keeping the weight under a tonne, we’ll have to wait and see. But if Autocar’s speculative render (top of page) turns out to be on the money, the added width will make it look jolly tasty.