Back in 1995, at the Frankfurt Motor Show, the Elise was unveiled and another lightweight Lotus legend was born. No doubt about it, the firm owes its survival to the model. It has, in all its iterations, wowed the press and public alike and generated (comparatively speaking) big sales number for Lotus. At the time Romano Artioli was the boss at Hethel. The Italian purchased Lotus from General Motors in 1993 before passing it on to Proton 1996. And he needed a name for the company's new sports car, so he named it after his then two-year-old granddaughter, Elisa Artioli.
So there's a nice symmetry - and let's face it, some perfectly placed social media publicity for Lotus - in the fact that Elisa, now 29, has collected the very last customer Lotus Elise to come off the line. The manufacturer has posted pictures of her picking up the Sport 240 Final Edition, which was the last manifestation of the featherweight sports car. It isn't the last Elise, though. That was the 35,124th and final example completed in December last year, which is destined to become part of Lotus's heritage collection.
It has to be said, Elisa's Sport 240 looks darn good in Championship Gold. And being a 240, the supercharged 1.8-litre Toyota four pot produces 240hp - more than double the power of the original S1. Mind you, it is a tad heavier than the S1, weighing in at 922kg - assuming she didn't opt for the lightweight carbon panels, lithium-ion battery, and polycarbonate rear screen that knock off around 25kg - but that's still a healthy power-to-weight ratio of 260hp per tonne.
As a result, Elisa will be able to do the 0-60mph dash in 4.1sec and, if she plans on driving the car back to her home in Bolzano, which would encompass a good chunk of derestricted autobahn, she'll be able to test the car's top speed of 147mph. As it happens, road trips are her thing. She regularly drives around Europe in her silver S1 and is now part of a small company that organises road trips, using a fleet of cars, including four Elises, an Evora 410 Sport, an Alpine A110 and a 996 GT3. These trips include runs to the disused Bugatti factory, which her grandfather set up after being persuaded by Ferruccio Lamborghini to buy the Bugatti name in 1987. He went on to become the chairman and develop the EB110 supercar.