Start with what the Lotus Etna is: a 2-door coupe with 4.0 liter Lotus 909 V8, built from 1984, in the age of turbocharging and the first electronic engine management. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign.
How it came about
The Lotus Etna is a one-off concept car designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, who also designed the Lotus Esprit. It premiered at the 1984 British International Motor Show. It is powered by a 4.0-litre V8 of Lotus design, code-named the Type 909. Engineer Tony Rudd had been asked in 1978 by Colin Chapman to build a new V8 engine that should have as much in common with the slant-four still operational across the Lotus family as possible, while conjuring at least 320bhp and 300lb ft. Meanwhile, other Lotus engineers were working on a new active suspension system for the firm's F1 Grand Prix machines that would eventually filter down into the road cars.
Lotus sent the Esprit chassis to Italdesign, with the new engine and gearbox in order to help Giorgetto Giugiaro with the packaging of his creation. When the Etna was revealed in Birmingham, it was promised that it would be the first road-going Lotus to receive this sophisticated suspension, along with traction control, ABS and noise cancelling – and, of course, Rudd's 4.0-litre Type 909 engine which ultimately produced 335bhp and 295lb ft. Only two Type 909s engines were built; the other had been retained by Lotus for display purposes. General Motors bought Lotus in 1986 and the Etna and Type 909 were put on ice and eventually killed, as the company changed tack completely, working towards an inexpensive sports car that would eventually emerge in 1989 as the front-wheel-drive Elan. The spirit of the Etna lived on in Peter Stevens’ Esprit remix of 1987, but the emergence of a new Lotus V8 engine would have to wait until 1996 – and t
The hardware
The engine is 4.0 liter Lotus 909 V8. On the scales it comes to 2606 lb. Drive goes through a 5-speed manual. The layout matters: the engine sits behind the driver and ahead of the rear axle, which puts the mass in the middle of the car and is why mid-engined cars change direction the way they do. The wheelbase is 99 in. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Renault Espace, the Ferrari Testarossa, the SEAT Ibiza. Its Lotus stablemates include the Lotus 100T and the Lotus 101.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Lotus Etna — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.