The British International Motor Show’s just about a little over a week away. One of the attractions of the show is the Greener Driving Pavilion which will showcase green initiatives from automakers as a part of the whole save-the-earth through gas-sippers move.

The Lotus Elise has been known to be that agile sports car that could take on more massive cars in winding roads due to its lightweightedness that improves its handling. Its 1.8L engine isn’t really a gas-guzzler compared to other cars and the fact that the car’s light improves fuel efficiency.

Now, they’ve decided that they’d make the car even more fuel-efficient in the Lotus Eco Elise. In true Elise fashion, they just trimmed off some more weight out. They took a Lotus Elise S, put it on a treadmill to shave off 70.5 lbs, and called it Eco. This was done by swapping some of the body panels to sustainable hemp technical fibers. Au natural.

The carpets are even made from sisal, a renewable crop yet abrasives-resistant. The paint on this thing is totally water-based (eliminating solvent emissions into the atmosphere). You just have to wonder whether it will wash off though. A few geek-greening they did here was slapping on a solar panel to help charge the car battery. They also placed a shift light to help drivers achieve bang-on shifting to avoid unnecessary revving.

Source: RevMods

I’m rewatching some older Clarkson stuff and just got through The Good, The Bad and The Ugly which is basically a humorous take on American cars. Quite unfair and biased stuff coming from Jeremy Clarkson especially when the Mustang was pitted against the Lotus Elise in a track battle.

That race, while biased, sealed the appeal of the Elise for me. And the 2008 Lotus line-up features a drool-worthy item in the Supercharged Elis SC. While in terms of stat sheets the old Elise and this new one are quite similar, the Exige SC features an all-new non-intercooled installation applied to the 1.8L 2-ZZ VVTL-i engine. The supercharge is tweaked to deliver the performance but slices 8 kgs off the car’s weight.

Speed and agility describes the Elise best and the numbers are quite phenomenal with naught to sixty at 4.4 seconds, a top speed of 150 mph and a green-ish 31 mpg (in sports car range).

Source: Lotus