Vehicle
Lotus Elan
The only front-wheel-drive Lotus ever built, which is the single most useful thing to know before working on one — nothing about its layout, its driveshafts or its suspension geometry resembles any other car the marque has made. The engine is an Isuzu 1.6, turbocharged in the SE, so its service data is Isuzu's; the body is composite over a steel backbone chassis, and that chassis is what corrodes. Kia bought the tooling and built the same car as the Kia Elan from 1996 to 1999 with its own 1.8 engine, which is a different powertrain in the same shell.
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Generations
-
M100 1989–1995
Series 1 to 1992 and a short Series 2 run in 1994-1995 using remaining Isuzu engines. The Kia-built cars that followed are the same body with a Kia T8D.
- Body styles
- Roadster
- Platform
- Lotus M100 steel backbone
- Engines
-
- 1.6 four-cylinder — 4XE1 · petrol · 97 kW (130 hp) · Isuzu, naturally aspirated
- 1.6 turbo — 4XE1-T · petrol · 123 kW (165 hp) · 201 Nm (148 lb-ft) · Isuzu, SE
- Transmissions
- 5-speed manual
- Drivetrain
- Front-wheel drive
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
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