Latest Car News
Lotus Makes Its Fastest Street Legal Sports Car Yet
Pushing the envelope – that’s what Lotus has been busy doing a lot lately. With fresh funding from Geely, we should see some new models in a year or two. Until then, the engineering team will keep showing how it can squeeze more performance out of the same vehicles.
This time around we get a big boost to the Lotus 3-Eleven. The new model, called the 3-Eleven 430, puts out, you guessed it, 430 horsepower. It can also sprint from 0-60 in 3.1 seconds and hit 180 mph. That makes for the fastest sports car Lotus has made for the road.
To give us this amazing upgrade, Lotus engineers upgraded the supercharged 3.5-liter V-6. The entire body is made of carbon composite, which you can see exposed on the side panels. As for the chassis, it’s an extruded and bonded aluminum structure.
Don’t get your hopes up about buying a Lotus 3-Eleven 430. Production will be capped at just 20 worldwide. Maybe you’ll see one in a museum or at Cars and Coffee one day.
With fully-electric Lotus models coming, it’ll be interesting to see these kinds of approaches applied with the new tech. I think Tesla will be hard-pressed to keep making wild performance claims, because Lotus will be one step ahead on that front.