After earning my engineering degree, I went to work at what was then Delco Moraine NDH (it later became Delphi and got spun off from +General Motors) on anti-lock brake systems. Amazingly my first assignments were working on the ABS for the Elan and the race version of the Esprit known as the X180R. What more could a young, freshly minted engineer ask for than to work on a pair of Lotus sports cars?

The Elan was a first in many ways for Lotus, reviving the name of one of the company's classics for its first ever front wheel drive model. Roger Becker, Ken Miles and the other chassis wizards at Hethel came up with some brilliant solutions to the problem of using the same axle to do propulsion and steering. If you hopped in and didn't know which end was providing the tractive effort and pushed the Elan around a track, you might not guess that it wasn't rear drive. This was mainly due to a rear suspension geometry that incorporated some passive steering by toeing in under side loading. 

As fun as the Elan was drive, it was unfortunately expensive to build despite the Isuzu turbo-four under the hood and even with its $40,000 price tag, Lotus still lost money on every example they sold. As a result Lotus ended up cancelling the Elan after just three years of production. That decision came about five weeks before the ABS system I worked on started production so the only ABS equipped Elans were the handful of development prototypes and about a dozen pilot production examples. 

It's a shame that the Elan went away prematurely, but the result was that Lotus regrouped and returned to the their roots to create the Elise a few years later without which Lotus probably wouldn't be with us today.