Lotus said Monday that it would be sending off its current lineup in some degree of style, with three new Exiges and two new Elises, all labeled Final Edition. This is very sad, but there’s some joy in knowing that Lotus will keep going.
All five cars have tiny improvements, and Lotus said they will be sold in limited quantities. The Lotus Elise Sport 240 Final Edition, for example, will get 24 extra horsepower, topping out at 240 HP, in a car that weighs less than 2,000 pounds. The Lotus Elise Cup 250 Final Edition adds an aero package meant to maximize downforce.
The three Exige models are no different, with the Exige Sport 390 Final Edition adding 47 HP (total of 397); the Exige Sport 420 Final Edition gets a 10 HP kick on top of that. The Exige Cup 430 Final Edition, which boasts 430 HP, is a car that Lotus says would be “at home on a challenging circuit,” which can probably be said for all of these cars, in that as almost all of the point of owning a Lotus. (You can see all the tweaks on every Final Edition here.)
In total, Lotus says it will have made around 55,000 Exiges, Evoras and Elises after production ends this year, which isn’t a bad return for cars that carried Lotus through the 2010s. Of those, only the Evora is sold in the U.S., but if you were curious about pricing anyway here’s a table showing how much the cars cost in Europe:
Lotus previously said it has new sports cars in the making, with one called the Type 131 going into production this year. Details beyond that are a bit sparse, but Lotus has said that it would be a practical car, priced in the range of these Final Editions.
I’m sure the new cars will also be very light. The new sports cars are very exciting, indeed, if Geely’s successful stewardship of Volvo is any indication of how well Geely might steer Lotus. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
