The Carchat

Click on the photo to read Autocar's story about Proton's announcement on the future of Lotus. Gone is Colin Chapman's philosophy of lightness and simplicity, and in comes aspirations of selling fancy, upmarket, luxury £100,000 cars. There are even plans to introduce a city car - Aston Martin's Cygnet is surely crass enough, but at least it's based on the fairly marvellous Toyota iQ. A Proton Lotus city car? Don't make me retch.

I posted some thoughts many months ago about the Elise facelift - positing my opinion that Lotus seems to think it's Ferrari - all but confirmed by the latest announcements. And of course, Michael posted this story last month about Lotus' ideas for lightweight cars in the future. Clearly a pamphlet of lies.

Thing is, we already have a Ferrari. From Italy. A Ferrari from Malaysia is going to take a while to become quite as glamorous and exciting, why not stick with 50 years of heritage from being Lotus of Norfolk? The problem for Lotus has been a lack of investment for years, not of engineering nous and a great philosophy. So many cool concepts and ideas have not come to fruition - where's the new Esprit, a sportier grand tourer to rival the Rapide?

With not even the merest hint of melodrama, it's a sad day, methinks.

Holy crap. I think Aston Martin is trying to break the Guinness world record for the largest shark jump in history. The Cygnet sort of looked kind of a little bit cool when it was being finished in clay and had a sort of off-white quality about it, but now you can play around with the customiser on the Aston website and spec it in Gulf Racing colours, or camouflage...oh, the humanity.

I sort of want a meteor to land on Gaydon, or for them to go dramatically bankrupt in the next month, just so that this never happens. Perhaps we'll all look back in a number of years as we sit in the CarChat bar in Schiphol airport and laugh conspiratorially, or lament our naive and carefree days. Perhaps we'll acknowledge the genius of AM's Cayenne moment, or perhaps we'll share a toast to a bygone manufacturer. Maybe we'll even have a chuckle at Daniel Craig tearing about in a two-seater city car with machine guns behind the fog lights in Risico (2011).

Aston Martin owners better not see this; these are the type of kids who leap over bushes and nick ming vases.

Looks better than the clay mockup; I wonder how long before we see the McLaren Smart.