Lotus 49
Lotus Cars
MarqueLotus Cars
Power420-440 hp @ 9,000-10,000 rpm
Race record12 wins from 42 races · 2 (1968, 1970 ) championships
Lotus Cars
This is the catalogue record of the Lotus 49, one of 104 models Lotus Cars has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
The record does not fix a firm introduction year for the Lotus 49, which is itself informative: cars without a clean launch date are usually prototypes, coachbuilt specials, or models whose history was written down long after the fact. The catalogue keeps them anyway, because the odd corners of the record are where the interesting machines hide.
On paper, the Lotus 49 reads like this: quoted output is 420-440 hp @ 9,000-10,000 rpm; kerb weight is recorded at 501 kg. Worked together, those figures give roughly 838 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Lotus Cars's own catalogue the Lotus 49 sits alongside the Lotus 100T, the Lotus 101, the Lotus 102, the Lotus 107. The record names the Lotus 43 as its predecessor and the Lotus 63 / Lotus 72 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Colin Chapman / / Maurice Philippe.
The Lotus 49 also has a competition record: 12 recorded wins from 42 starts and 2 (1968, 1970 ) championships. A race history changes how a car should be valued — competition machines appreciate on provenance, not depreciation curves.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
The catalogue records what the Lotus 49 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.