Desirable Cars
LOTUS MODERN & CLASSIC ICONS

Desirable Lotuses

"Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere." Colin Chapman's philosophy won Lotus seven Formula One Constructors' titles.

"Simplify, Then Add Lightness"

Few founding philosophies have proven this durable across so many decades of changing automotive fashion. Colin Chapman founded Lotus in 1952 and built his entire approach around stripping weight out rather than adding power, a mantra that guided both his road cars and a genuinely dominant run in Formula One — seven Constructors' Championships and six Drivers' titles between 1962 and 1978, alongside a win at the Indianapolis 500. That same philosophy shaped road cars like the Elan, which weighed a genuinely featherweight 640kg yet could out-handle far more powerful rivals on a country road, and the Seven, so minimalist it stayed in production for fifteen years before Lotus sold the design outright to Caterham.

That obsession with lightness over brute power remains the throughline connecting the earliest Lotus road cars to the current Emira, the brand's final combustion-engined sports car before its full shift to electrification. Below are the models we've covered so far.