We’ve always called it the Eagle, but now it looks like the production version of Lotus’ all-new 2+2 sports car will have a different name when its launched at the London motor show in a few weeks time.
So what's it going to be called?
I'd be amazed if Lotus abandoned its modern naming nomenclature (Esprit, Elise, Exige, Europa etc) so I reckon we're in for another punchy word beginning with ‘E’. That leaves us with this
short list.
Good start. But the real clue comes from a weird viral advertising campaign called ‘
the faceless people’, which Lotus won’t admit it has anything to do with, even though we know it does.
The big-font strap line on
www.facelesspeople.com, the campaign’s website, is ‘True Character will emerge in...’ with a countdown clock to the British motor show. Now, 'true character' roughly defined means ‘Ethos’.
And 'Lotus Ethos' sounds pretty good, doesn't it? It would fit the bill perfectly.
We did some digging on the patent office’s public website and found that the name ‘Ethos’ was copyrighted to Lotus Cars UK in America on March 12th 2008. The name Eagle, by the way, was not.
By now we were quite enjoying this Friday afternoon word game, so we put in a call to Lotus asking about their new Ethos, which was promptly rebutted with a hard “no comment”.
So no confirmation. It might be called the Lotus Ethos, or this might be an elaborate red herring. But if I were a gambling man, I’d bet £100 that we've got our name.
Anyway, looking forward to the motor show to find out.
