Elan Accidently Made In Wrong Size!

[Ridgeman580]

As Lotus chief Mike Kimberly and designer Peter Stevens looked at an early drawing showing the dimensions of the car that would become the front-wheel-drive Elan, Kimberly casually remarked that putting an extra two inches into the wheelbase would allow the cash strapped company to perhaps produce a 2+2 version at some point in the future. Steven agreed, and the drawing was sent off for reworking. It wasn't until after an expensive model of the car was made that someone realized the draftsmen had taken two inches out of the wheelbase instead of adding them. By then Lotus was too deeply committed to make the changes it wanted. When the first production vehicles started coming off the line, Stevens realized something else was wrong, but couldn't quite figure out what the problem was. It wasn't until he put one of the production cars alongside the model that he saw the production bodies were bigger than they should be. No one had told the draftsmen in the Lotus drawing office that the Elan's plastic body would be built using a new, specially developed resin that didn't shrink as it cured. As was normal practice at Lotus, draftsmen had scaled up all the body tooling drawings by 0.25 percent to account for shrinkage, which meant the Elan's body was slightly bigger than it should have been in every single dimension. As there was no money for new tooling, Stevens proposed pushing the wheels out 10mm to fill the arches better and give the car a better stance, but this was vetoed by the ride and handling engineers. As a compromise, he changed the trim tooling so the wheel arches were made 10mm smaller in diameter. The Elan remained the wrong size.