Lotus founder Colin Chapman had a mantra he followed with almost religious fanaticism: “To go fast, add lightness.” He saw cutting mass as a key to performance. It’s also a key to fuel economy and reduced emissions.

A study by Lotus Engineering finds cutting the mass of a car — Lotus used an ordinary Toyota Venza — by as much as 38 percent would add just 3 percent to the cost of the vehicle while reaping big benefits in fuel economy and emissions. Why? Because lighter cars can use smaller engines and therefore less fuel.

The famed British engineering firm conducted the research to develop a commercially viable strategy for cutting flab from mainstream passenger vehicles by 2020. The study (.pdf), released by the International Council on Clean Transportation, focused on using lightweight materials like aluminum and composites in tandem with more economical design — i.e. fewer parts.

By the time Lotus finished the nips and tucks, the Venza had 38 percent less mass. Yet Lotus says adopting those changes would add no more than 3 percent to the cost of the vehicle (which starts at $26,275). The engineers achieved that result using engineering techniques and technologies it says will be viable enough for mainstream automobiles by 2020.

The potential increases in fuel economy are nothing to sneeze at. According to estimates by the Department of Energy, cutting the mass of a vehicle by one-third brings a 23 percent reduction in fuel consumption. And since CO2 emissions are correlated with fuel consumption, we’d see a reduction there, too.

“Lighter vehicles are cleaner and more efficient,” Dr Robert Hentschel, director of Lotus Engineering, said in a statement. “That philosophy has always been core to Lotus’ approach to vehicle engineering and is now more relevant than ever.”

To give you an example of some the tricks Lotus used, we’ll look at the body, which includes the floor, underbody, dash panel and the exterior panels. The Venza uses more than 400 parts; the Lotus engineers said greater integration of components could cut that to 211. What’s more, 100 percent of these parts on the 2010 Venza are steel. The 2020 model would use 37 percent aluminum, 30 percent magnesium, 21 percent composites and 7 percent high-strength steel. (Lotus didn’t say what the remaining 5 percent of the material would be. Glass, perhaps?) The result is a 42 percent reduction in mass, cutting the body shell from 842 pounds to 487.

For those of you who think the nip/tucked Venza would be an uncomfortable deathtrap, think again. Lotus said the lightened vehicle retains its interior and exterior dimensions and volumes and it meets key safety, structural dimensional and quality targets. It also retains the vision, sight line and comfort of the flabbier vehicle. In other words, it still looks, rides and feels like a Venza.

Actually, with 38 percent less mass, it probably handles better than the original.

Main photo of a 2010 Venza: Toyota. Rendering showing the nip/tucked Venza: Lotus

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Back in the early 1960s, Lotus turned up at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to challenge race cars that Lotus founder Colin Chapman considered dinosaurs. The men who built and drove those dinosaurs derided Team Lotus and its new-fangled mid-engined car until the great Jimmy Clark ended up beating A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones and the rest of the field like a bunch of rented mules in 1965. Then they all started lining up for mid-engined cars.

Lotus isn’t predicting the same kind of success at the Indy Grand Prix of Alabama this weekend, but it is hoping for a better finish than it has had at the first two races of the season.

But Lotus may have bigger plans for IndyCar. Like, say, providing the chassis or engines the rest of the field will use beginning in 2012.

The venerable British automaker, which was a venerable British racing team long before it started making road cars, competed at the Indianapolis 500 from 1963 through 1969, winning it in 1965 with the gorgeous Type 38 driven by Clark.

Lotus returned to IndyCar racing this season but it has gotten off to a rough start. Takuma Sato has been driving the Lotus entry, decked out in the traditional green with a yellow racing stripe, in the 2010 IZOD Indy Racing Series, but so far has failed to finish a race because of accidents. Still, the team is hopeful of its chances in Alabama.

“The track at Barber is a lot more like an F1 circuit, which is what I am used to,” Sato, a former Formula 1 driver, said. “I do enjoy the street races, but they can be harder to get into a rhythm, so I am really looking forward to pushing myself and the car hard, making up for the issues we had at the last race at St. Petersburg and making Lotus proud.”

Never let it be said Sato doesn’t know how to drive. He drove for F1 teams Jordan, BAR and Super Aguri and has a reputation for being a bit, well, banzai on the track. He’s never been one to be easily threatened or intimidated — one need only recall that amazing pass he put on double world champion Fernando Alonso at the Canada Grand Prix in 2007 to know he won’t back down from a fight. And the reconstituted Lotus Indycar team is backing him up, 110 percent.

“I am really looking forward to this weekend. The Lotus mechanics together with the KV Racing team have been working hard on getting the perfect set-up for Taku to suit his driving style. Barber Motorsports Park feels like a home from home as the resort houses the largest collection of classic Lotus cars anywhere in the world, so I would like to think that we have a small psychological advantage over our competitors,” Claudio Berro, Director of Motorsport for Lotus said.

But Lotus may have more than the top step of the podium in mind. IndyCar is essentially a spec series where all the teams run Dallara chassis and Honda engines. There is widespread speculation that Lotus may make a bid to provide the engines, developed with Cosworth, or the chassis when the engine specs take effect in 2012. Racking up some wins would go a long way toward giving Lotus some credibility.

Main photo: Lotus. And because we’ve got ‘em, here are some historical photos of Jimmy Clark and the Lotus crew at Indy in 1965 courtesy of IMS Photo.

Photos: Lotus

We found a trove of pics of great Lotus cars from years gone by while raiding the company’s photo archive for shots of Hethel’s new hybrid. The photos are more than a look back at several reasons Colin Chapman should be canonized.

Scroll through the auto porn and you can trace the lineage of the Evora 414E Hybrid from the Elite through the Evora with some DNA from Lotus’ legendary Formula 1 cars. You can’t look at these pics and think Lotus didn’t make damn sure its hybrid concept car lives up to the company’s reputation for fine sports cars.

The Lotus story starts in 1952 when Chapman founded the company, but it built only race cars until the Type 14, known as the Elite (pictured above), appeared at the London auto show in 1957 and in showrooms the following year. The Elite was developed in just one year with input from some of the company’s racing customers.

Aside from its attractive styling, what really set the car off was that it was fiberglass. Not just the body, as you’d find on the all-American Corvette. The Elite featured a highly innovative fiberglass monocoque construction for the entire load-bearing structure of the car. That made the car lighter, stiffer and more crashworthy, and despite having just 75 horsepower, the Elite was a formidable racer.

This is the Elan, or Lotus 26, built between 1962 and 1973. It was intended as a less expensive alternative to the Elite, which bowed out in 1963. The Lotus Elan reminds  you a bit of the Mazda Miata, doesn’t it? That’s because the Lotus 36, a later version of the Elan, was the inspiration for it. And the Elan is just like the Miata, only with better handling and less weight (just 1,300 pounds). Sadly, it also had less reliability, but that’s beside the point. Five minutes in an Elan with the top down on a country road and you’ll know Chapman was one of the best chassis engineers in history.

The Lotus Europa was the first mass-produced mid-engine road car and a lightweight flier of a ride. The car, built between 1965 and 1975, typified  Chapman’s ethos: “Simplify, then add lightness.” It featured a central spine chassis and a high revving four-banger. It went through several iterations that used Renault and Ford Cosworth engines, and every one of them handled like it was on the proverbial rails. Only a fool would have challenged one to a street race back in the mid-’60s, and even now the cars can be absolute terrors on an autocross course.

When Roger Moore was James Bond, he drove an Esprit Turbo. The Esprit appeared in 1975 as a replacement to the Elan and Europa, and by the time it was turbocharged in 1980, the car could run with Ferraris and Porsches and the like. And it did it using a 2.2-liter four-cylinder engine that was boosted to within an inch of its life. That made it about as enduring as a hand grenade, but wow — what a performer.

Don’t forget that Lotus did a lot of racing and was quite an innovator, especially in Formula 1. The gorgeous Type 25 introduced the monocoque chassis to the sport. But you could argue the Lotus 49 pictured above was the first modern grand prix car. It won its debut at the Dutch GP at the hands of the immortal Jim Clark. The car featured a monocoque chassis, and it marked the first time the engine was used as a stressed member. The engine in question was the formidable Cosworth DFV engine. Give a machine like that to racers like Clark and Graham Hill and Jochen Rindt and you gave Enzo Ferrari headaches for years. Hill won the championship in 1968 and Rindt won it in 1970.

The Lotus Type 72 used an improved version of the Cosworth DFV in a chassis packed with innovations like inboard brakes, sidepod-mounted radiators and an aerodynamic “door stop” design. The John Player black and gold livery pretty much defined class and sponsor involvement for the era. The car was way ahead of its time, and it brought Lotus the constructors’ championship in 1970, ‘72 and ‘73. Guys like Jochen Rindt, Emerson Fittipaldi — who won the drivers’ championships in 1970 and ‘72, respectively — Ronnie Peterson and Jacky Ickx drove the Type 72. Guys driving anything else got used to seeing the 72’s rear wing.

Speaking of getting beat like a drum, say hello to the Lotus Type 79. If your name wasn’t Mario Andretti and you weren’t driving a Type 79 in the 1978 Grand Prix season, you didn’t win very often. This was the first car to fully exploit a then-little-understood phenomena/aerodynamic trick know as ground effect. The underside of the car was sculpted like an inverted airplane wing and sealed the sides with innovative sliding skirts. The result was a car that stuck to the road like gum on hot asphalt. After crushing the field like a bunch of grapes at Zandvoort, Andretti said, “You could have put a chimp in that car and won with it!” And if you think that detracts from Mario’s skill, you don’t know much about racing.

Yes, we know Lotus build many, many more amazing cars, and if it had included photos of any of them in its archive, we would have kept going.

Photos: Lotus

Electric cars and hybrid exotics are all the rage at this year’s Geneva Motor Show, with everyone from Audi to Ferrari — yes, Ferrari — rolling into the show with one.

Yes, the Porsche 918 Spyder plug-in hybrid stole our hearts, but the Lotus Evora 414E Hybrid has us just a smitten. After teasing us last week with a picture of the car’s drivetrain, Lotus finally gave us the full monty.

This is the first hybrid from Hethel, and it hews closely to the company line set down all those years ago by the great Collin Chapman. It’s small and it looks like it’d be fun in the twisties and it cranks out 414 horsepower and an eyeball-flattening 590 pound-feet of torque using electric motors for propulsion. Yes, motors. There are two, one for each rear wheel, with torque vectoring to improve the handling.

It’s a range-extended EV like the Chevrolet Volt, meaning there’s a 47 horsepower gasoline motor that powers a generator to keep the juice flowing when the batteries run flat. The lithium-ion pack is good for 35 miles, then a Lotus-designed monoblock three-cylinder engine kicks in. The engine itself is an impressive bit of kit you can read about here.

No word from Lotus on whether this car will see production, but we’d love to see them rolling off the line alongside the Evora and Elise.

Read more about the Evora 414E Hybrid in our earlier post.

Photos: Lotus. More after the jump.

To see just how good an engineering firm Lotus is and just how amazing its cars are, check out this slick concept we’ll see in Geneva. It accelerates like a top-shelf Porsche, is more efficient than a Toyota Prius and is as graceful as Kim Yu-Na.

Oh, did we mention it’s a range-extended electric vehicle akin to the Chevrolet Volt?

Yes, an EV.

It’s called the Evora 414E Hybrid. The environmentally focused technology demonstrator — what the rest of us call a concept car — from Lotus Engineering produces 414 horsepower, a staggering figure for a car this small, in a nimble little chassis. Lotus founder Colin Chapman would love this car. If you EV naysayers won’t finally give cars with cords a little love after seeing this one, there is no hope for you whatsoever.

The electric Lotus Evora showcases the Lotus Versatile Vehicle Architecture, a vehicle platform designed to reduce the cost of developing niche vehicles by using shared components. In this case, the platform carries a pair of electric motors, each producing 207 horsepower and 295 pound feet of torque. Each drives a rear wheel via single-speed geartrain. The geartrain is integrated into a common transmission housing that, in addition to making for neat packaging and saving weight, also enables torque vectoring for stability control of the vehicle.

Although the car has but a single speed, Lotus created a “simulated” seven-speed paddle-shifted transmission that replicates the experience of changing gears. Why on earth would Lotus do that, you ask? To mimic the driving dynamics and experience of a conventional sports car. “Shifting” gears in the 414E allows you to control deceleration by simulating the engine braking of downshifting. It also regulates the regenerative braking. which in a car like the Tesla Roadster tends to be an all-or-nothing affair. (D’Oh! Turns out we were lifting off the pedal too aggressively.)

“The Lotus system effectively allows the driver to select the appropriate level of regeneration by simulating stepping down one, two or even three gears,” the company says. “The simulation of engine braking through both the gear noise change and the retardation of the vehicle is fully intuitive to a driver familiar with a conventional gearbox.”

Electrical power is stored in a 17 kilowatt-hour lithium polymer battery mounted in the center of the vehicle for stability and safety and that low polar moment of inertia all gearheads crave. The car can go 35 miles on battery power alone, about twice what the Toyota Prius Plug-In can do and slightly less than the Volt’s claim of 40 miles. When the battery’s dead, the Lotus “range-extender engine” kicks on to keep the juice flowing until you can plug the car into the wall. No word on the recharge time.

Lotus developed the engine specifically for range-extended EVs. It’s a 1.2-liter three-cylinder mill that uses something Lotus calls monoblock construction. That means the engine block, cylinder head and exhaust manifold are a single casting. Lotus says the single-casting approach results in less mass — something Chapman was fanatical about — and reduced manufacturing cost. The engine weighs just 85 kilograms (about 187 pounds) and produces 35 kilowatts, more than enough to keep the electric motors turning when the battery runs down.

What’s the bottom line? Zero to 60 in less than 4 seconds. That’s an astonishing figure for any vehicle, let alone an electric vehicle. It’s on par with the Tesla Roadster, the Porsche 911 GT3 RS and Corvette ZR1.

So far, there are no formal announcements about this car ever seeing production, but if Lotus builds it — and we highly encourage them to do so — we will be the first to order one. In Lotus Factory Racing Green with a yellow racing stripe, of course.

UPDATE: 4 p.m Eastern: As commenter lorencc notes, you can control the regen in the Roadster pretty effectively. Turns out we were lifting off the pedal too aggressively when we drove the Roadster Sport. D’oh! I guess that means we’ll have to drive the car again to give it another try… / Chuck Squatriglia

Photo: Lotus. That’s all they gave us. We’ll have more from the Geneva Motor Show when the car is unveiled.

See Also:

• Classic Lotus Gives Detroit Some Elan
• Lotus Targets Tesla With EV of Its Own
• Lotus Has Big Plans for a Small Engine
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DETROIT — It never fails. Every time we go to a big auto show, the one car we really want to take home is at least as old as we are.

This time it was a gorgeous 1967 Lotus Elan with just 30,000 miles on the odometer. Or maybe it’s a ‘66 with 32,000. Eric Schick wasn’t sure. He works for Auto Europe, a Lotus and Morgan dealer flying the flag for those esteemed marques here at the North American International Auto Show. The car belongs to a local collector, as does the Morgan behind it.

The Elan was tucked away at the back of the Lotus stand — which, by coincidence, was next to the Tesla Motors stand. Shame you had to go looking for it, because it was one of the coolest cars at the show. Of course, many of the 700,000 people who herd through the Cobo Center in the coming days will have no clue what it is.

“A lot of people ask if it’s a Miata,” Schick told us.

As much as we love Miatas — you can stop laughing now — the Elan is better because, well, it’s a Lotus.

This particular car is a “fixed head” coupe. Like the roadsters, it’s got a twin-cam 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine, four-wheel disc brakes and independent suspension all the way around. You’ll find that on bargain-basement cars like the Chevrolet Aveo these days, but that was top-shelf in the ’60s.

The Elan was as light as it was advanced, weighing a mere 1,500 pounds. Lotus founder Colin Chapman was so fanatical about shaving weight he once famously said, “Any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy.”

Still, the Elan was solid enough for Jim Clark — one of the best Formula 1 drivers ever — to drive his to races throughout Europe. Somehow we don’t see Jarno Trulli or Heikki Kovaleinen doing that in an Evora.

Photo: Chuck Squatriglia / Wired.com

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