Lotus Carlton

The Lotus Carlton is one of 104 Lotus Cars models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1990. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Lotus Carlton properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Honda Honda NSX, the Renault Renault Clio, the Ford Ford Explorer — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lotus Carlton reads like this: the record lists its engine as 3.6 L Opel C36GET twin-turbocharged I6; quoted output is 382 PS at 5,200 rpm; kerb weight is recorded at 1655 kg; top speed is given as 285 km/h; drive goes through 6-speed ZF S6-40 manual; the layout is Longitudinal front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 231 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. Production is recorded at 950 units, which makes it a limited-production machine by any standard.

Its place in the Lotus Cars story

Within Lotus Cars's own catalogue the Lotus Carlton sits alongside the Lotus 100T, the Lotus 101, the Lotus 102, the Lotus 107. The record names the Lotus Cortina as its predecessor and the wheelbase = 2730 mm as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Anthony Lo. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Hethel, Norfolk (Group Lotus).

How this catalogue works

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.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Lotus Carlton costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.