Lotus doesn’t have much of a history in sedans, but during its time as General Motors company, it gave the world the Carlton. Based on the Opel Omega, the Carlton was GM Europe engineering with Lotus’ finesse. The car was also called the Opel Lotus Omega, Lotus Omega, and Vauxhall Lotus Omega.
The sport sedan boasted a Lotus-upgraded twin-turbo inline-six engine with 377 horsepower shared with the more common Opel engine. A six-speed manual transmission handled shifting duties. In the early 1990s, 377 hp was pretty mad for a sedan and the car quickly became another piece of forbidden fruit in the United States.
Opel planned to build 1,100 of the special Lotus cars, but a recession ultimately curbed demand. When production ended in 1992, only 950 cars rolled off the production line. By 1993, GM sold Lotus, but not before the company had a hand in another GM product: the C4 Corvette ZR-1Â and its 5.7-liter LT5 DOHC V8 engine.
Comments
Lotus also supplied the Opel Speedster, a version of the Lotus Elise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Speedster
I’ts a left hand drive Lotus (Opel) Omega, not a Lotus (Vauxhall) Carlton.
XtremWize, in Britain, the car was called a Lotus Carlton, which started out as a Vauxhall Carlton, until Lotus got their hands on it. In Germany, it was also sold as an Opel
I always thought it was a pity Lotus never stuffed a version of the LT5 they designed for Chevrolet under the hood, that would’ve been epic, since they used the same transmission Chevrolet gave the LT5 powered C4 ZR1
Americans never saw the Lotus Carlton, and have no idea the fuss it caused in Britain 25 yrs ago on release. It went from 0-60 mph faster than a Ferrari Testarossa, and only Ferrari’s F40 went from 0 to 100 and back to 0 again faster than this. It was rated officially with a top speed of about 176mph, but if you redlined it in 5th before you shifted to 6th……..you could hit almost 190 mph