Lotus

Lotus
Appearance	Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition
Industry	Automotive
Founded	1948
Founders	Colin Chapman
Fate	Active
HQ	Hethel, Norfolk, England, United Kingdom
Key People	Qingfeng Feng (CEO) Matt Windle (MD)
Areas Served	Worldwide
Products	Automobiles
Website	lotuscars.com

Lotus (officially Lotus Cars Limited) is a British automotive company that appears in Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition. The company manufacturers sports cars and racing cars known for their light weight and fine handling characteristics. Lotus Engineering, an offshoot of Lotus Cars and engineering consultancy firm, has facilities located in the United Kingdom, United States, China and Malaysia.

Lotus Cars was founded and owned by design engineer Colin Chapman for many years. After his death in 1982 and some financial instability, Lotus Cars was bought out by General Motors. Then Lotus was bought by Italian entrepreneur and Buggati owner Romano Artioli. Lotus was again bought out by Proton, a Malaysian car manufacturer and subsidiary of DRB-HICOM from 1996 to 2017. Lotus is now currently owned by Chinese manufacturer Geely along with Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, a Malaysian tycoon who owns a minority share through Etika Automotive.

Lotus has previously been involved in Formula One through Team Lotus, where Colin Chapman's talents were mostly seen as he was chief designer of the team. Team Lotus also competed in Formula Two, Formula Ford, Formula Junior, IndyCar and sports car racing . They won the Formula 1 Constructors Championship (team championship) 7 times.

Some of Lotus' notable cars include the Elise, the Seven, the Esprit, and the Elan.

Vehicles

2002 Lotus Esprit V8 (Series 4)
(Rear Quarter View)

2004 Lotus Elise 111R (S2)
(Rear Quarter View)

Logo History

The Lotus logo has gone through 6 different designs throughout its history. The logo has relatively followed the same design since the first one, with moderately modified logos between 1984 and 1989. The logo is the Lotus wordmark curving upwards and the initials of the founder "ACBC" (Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman) placed inside a triangle within a circle. The letters "ACB" are smaller and sit inside a bigger letter "C", forming a monogram. The outlines were white and the background was black.

The next logo only featured the triangle with the "Lotus" wordmark, the background was green and the outlines/letters were in yellow. The 3rd logo used the same time but features the monogram of the founder's initial. The 4th logo used the 3rd logo's design and placed it back in a circle like the 1st logo. This time, the triangle was green, the circle was yellow and the outlines/letters were white. The 5th and 6th logos were slight modifications of the previous logo, only changing the outline colors or removing them entirely.

1948-1984

1984-1986

1986-1989

1989-2010

2010-2019

2019-Now

Trivia

• Both Lotus cars are put into the Tuner class, despite lacking body modifications. This is due to balancing purposes, as such, the Lotus cars can be considered pseudo-exotics due to the lack of bodykits.