Lotus Cars
This is the catalogue record of the Lotus Elise GT1, 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 record places its introduction in 1997. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Lotus Elise GT1 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 Toyota Toyota Prius, the Subaru Subaru Forester, the Škoda Auto Škoda Octavia — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Lotus Elise GT1 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 5.7 L Chevrolet Chevrolet small-block engine (first- and second-generation)#LT5 / LT5 V8 engine / V8 / 3.5 L Lotus Cars / Lotus Lotus 900 series#Type 918 / Type 918 twin-turbocharg; kerb weight is recorded at 1050 kg (road car) / 950 kg; drive goes through 5-speed Renault manual (road car), 6-speed sequential; the layout is Rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive. 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 Elise GT1 sits alongside the Lotus 100T, the Lotus 101, the Lotus 102, the Lotus 107. The record names the Lotus Esprit GT1 as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Design is credited to Julian Thomson. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Hethel, Norfolk.
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 Elise GT1 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.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.