The Lotus Carlton / Omega Sedan Was a World-Beating PR Nightmare - Jason Cammisa Revelations Ep. 28

Now, for my next issue, I'd like to go back to the classics, welcome to the 1990s of Blockbuster Video, the Sony Discman, you got a mail, don't you really want to meet the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the only four-door

sedan

? To once have the

lotus

badge, the Carlton was the red-eyed, wide-body Dodge Charger Hellcat of its era, so irresponsible and reprehensibly fast that the government asked its own manufacturer to condemn it. If you're an American kid from the 1990s, you'll hear the name. Carlton and think about the character in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which is ironic for Alanis because The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was an examination of the socioeconomic status that Will Smith sent to the working class to his upper-class uncles in Bel Air.

As Americans we identify with and root for the working class Will Smith and the preppy Carlton were mocked, but the opposite tends to happen in the UK where one does not mock the revered members of society who are encourages belittling the working class, so when General Motors gave the peasants as much speed as the rich had already been enjoying in their Ferraris, it really shook their wings, criminals will drive these extraordinarily fast machines, they cried and they were right, okay cut it first things first for all you Americans opal was the brand under which General Motors cars sold in Europe in the UK Oppo was called Vauxhall in 1987 Opel launched an all new rear wheel drive

sedan

called Omega in the UK was badged Vox Hall Carlton and was large by 1980s European car standards, meaning it is the same size as the current Honda Civic, the Omega Carlton twins immediately won the car award European Championship of the year 1987 and were received with much praise, especially for their stellar aerodynamic properties with a drag coefficient as low as 0.28, they could reach high speeds without much effort. fuel or power and the Carlton Omega didn't have much power, the base gasoline engine made only 80 horsepower, but that was enough for over 110 miles per hour and although the larger engine only made 156 horsepower, that It was good for a dollar. 35, which was a great speed in the late 1980s, but it wasn't enough to see that the man in charge of General Motors was a car guy and didn't like that GM Europe had a reputation for making boring, uninspiring cars that For example, Opel was working on a 24-valve head, but that wasn't enough for Bob or Mike Kimberly, the head of Lotus, the company GM had just bought Lotus. was more than just a car company, Lotus was a consultant and apart from the obvious things like engineering, the whole DeLorean Lotus had its dirty little secret fingers on cars from almost every car manufacturer in the

world

, including GM.

In fact, when the Omega came out, Lotus was in the process of creating the lt5, the V8-killing 32-valve quadcam aluminum block monster for the king of the hill Corvette ZR1 and Bob Eaton thought a stupidly fast sedan would be the right way to show the

world

that opal wasn't boring, why was I wrong? but we'll get there in a second, in 1988 the project began using Opel's Flagship Senator, which was actually confusingly the same car as the Carlto Mega, just with older styling under the hood. It would be that Lotus developed the Corvette ZR1 V8, but Bob Eaton.

He wanted the sedan to debut alongside the ZR1 at the 1989 Geneva Motor Show, which was just a couple of months away. The problem was that a V8 wouldn't fit between the front frame rails of the V platform without extensive structural modification and that meant engineering and re-homologation costs. For crash testing, but more importantly, the time they didn't have was the lt5 and the Aetna V8 from Lotus and the 5 liter V8 from GM's Australian brand, Holden. Instead, the engineer concentrated on the old straight-six with and without the upcoming 24-valve. head with and without turbochargers and in displacements 3.0, 3.6, 3.9 and 4 liters but the hot Senator did not work, a phrase that surely no one has said before would not work because it would be too expensive, it would be sold in very few units and it would be confusing for customers because the senator as lineup had no sporting abilities to begin with, the cult of Omega despite being the same car, there was already the sporty Omega 3000 slash called on the GSI models and a 24 valve area was to come.

Just six weeks before the sportier Lotus made its debut in Geneva, the entire project moved from the Senator to the cult Omega with the goal of being the best and fastest sports sedan on the planet. To achieve this, Lotus took the new 24 from Opal. valve head and bolted it to the old inline six, now increased to 3.6 liters and then added not one but two turbochargers, the result was 377 horsepower, two more than the Corvette ZR1 King of the Hill V8 and this made 419 lbs. -foot torque. which was 50 more than the Corvettes and, by the way, 150 pound-feet of torque more than the next most powerful sedan, the BMW 5, which this would leave for dead.

There was only one transmission in the world that could handle that torque output and it was the zf6b developed for the Corvette ZR1 and Lotus ended up having to fight GM to get it because Chevy had an exclusive and had no interest in helping Lotus. Opal also had no interest in helping Lotus. In fact, Opal got in Lotus's way at almost every turn. The way it looks, this completely dwarfed Opal's 3-litre 24-valve variant and probably out of jealousy, Opal flatly refused to build the Lotus variant in the regular call-up to the Mega production line. Excuse me, my pager is ringing, that's pretty embarrassing, I have to take this.

So the only way Lotus could make this car was with the most outrageously expensive waste of natural resources ever contradicting the simplification and addition of lightness. Mantra Opal would produce a standard 24 valve opal Omega 3000 or Vauxhall Carfen GSI and ship it fresh from the factory from Lossheim. Germany to Hethel England using bumpers and placeholder wheels, then Lotus would attack it by stripping the car halfway, removing the doors from the inside and then pulling the drivetrain and sending it back to Germany to put it in another car next door, the nice folks at Lotus walked up to their new car and took a plasma cutter to the wheel arches and cut out the floor so it would fit the ZF six speed and fitted the opal designed fenders and modified body panels and then they had to protect the assembly again against rust. car and touching up all the Imperial Green paint was, by the way, the only color you can see, it's green and then in came the big engine, AP Racing brakes, 17-inch Ronal monoblock wheels and a limited slip differential from the Holden Commodore.

Next, a completely reworked suspension including self-leveling at the rear because Lotus was concerned that the rear semi-trailing arm suspension would show too much camber change when fully loaded for safe continuous operation at top speed. If you're a Lotus engineer this is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night, Lotus finally slapped a Lotus Vin because Opal refused to let it be called Opal or Vauxhall, Lotus Omega or, if it's right-hand drive Lotus Carlton, not to be confused with Carlton Banks. Who is the cousin of the new Prince? All that work at Heffel required 130 hours of work not counting the engine build.

As you can imagine, this was an expensive car in Germany, costing more than double what a fully loaded Omega 3024 valve cost, which in turn was almost double what it cost. a basic Omega cost four times as much, but more than three times the power of a car that, if you remember, didn't need much horsepower to go fast, so it had a top speed of 177 miles per hour. making it, by some margin, the fastest regular production sedan in the world - in fact, the German government certified it at 182 miles per hour, although that car could have been running the cheat programming that was in the cars that Lotus delivered to the media. activate that programming by turning on the headlights, starting the engine and holding it at 2000 RPM for 30 seconds and the first time I step on it I can walk, this thing is incredibly fast and listen, it's not like the Carlton Omega is some kind of special tuner that took off at high speeds no, this thing was as aerodynamically stable at Ferrari Testarossa speeds as a normal Omega was parked and I mention the Ferrari Testarossa not only because the Carlton can keep up with it but because no one in the world had a problem with the 180 mile Ferrari per hour, but everyone in the UK had a problem with 180mph Vauxhall, everyone, including of course the police and the government, but also motoring journalists.

We're supposed to love these things. Heck, the police chiefs association called it an outrageous invitation to speed before the car even went into production. The editor of Autocar magazine wrote a scathing opinion piece recommending that Vauxhall limit the Carlton's top speed. High top speeds, whether used or not, are an essential ingredient in uncompromising sports cars, but Vox Hall's Carltons. no, this is marketing at work, a dangerous example of ours is better than yours, immaturity, okay, there's a lot to unpack here, but the no-compromise sports car thing really gives a bad grade, especially since our little hypocrite Bob had just crash an uncompromising sports car with a Ferrari. badge on it a year earlier, shortly after, just two months after the first Carlton was delivered to its owner.

Bob Eaton's attempt to make GM Europe cool ended up becoming the poster child for everything that was wrong with British society. Here's an extract from the Parliament House Commons Transcript from a guy called Tony. It's ridiculous that automakers have to advertise vehicles that have top speeds of 140, 150, 170 miles per hour. Some of those products are cheap cars that can be purchased by those who are unable to drive them safely. Baron Carlisle of Beru replied: Will the honorary knight join me in condemning? It is especially the great publicity recently given to a Vauxhall Carlton which is apparently capable of reaching 100 to 70 miles per hour;

It should not be available for sale to the public even at an outrageous price. price of I think £45,000 and therein lies the problem was not that the Lotus Carlton could go 180 miles per hour the problem was not that the Lotus Carlton was inherently unsafe at 180 miles per hour the problem was that the Lotus Carlton was a outrageous and cheap price of 45,000. Come on, a Testarossa was twice as much and they were angry that the middle class could afford it. Look, the UK is a classist society and the people who bought Vox Halls, well, they were like the people who buy.

Dodge Chargers today uh yeah, like sleazy Americans. I love that for the price of a sport package on a Ferrari, some redneck can buy an 807 horsepower Dodge Charger. Hell, Dodge calls it jailbreaking because they know exactly who will buy it and what they are. I'm going to do with that I'm sorry, that's totally awesome, here's what's not awesome, a bunch of sophisticates in wigs telling the general public that if you're rich enough you can drive a 180 mile per hour Ferrari Testarossa , but if you don't have a lord in his name, well, he'll just take a fast car and use it to commit crimes.

I'm not making this up, that was one of their real arguments and this is the best part: they were absolutely right three years later. Carlton was robbed by a gang of people who were probably not aristocrats. Over the next few months they used him to rob shops and steal £20,000 worth of cigarettes and alcohol and the police could do nothing about it because nothing could stop him. "They approached the Lotus Carlton, certainly not the police cars, so these guys had no problem knocking down a shop 30 meters from a police station. There are all sorts of stories about police helicopters not being able to follow the pace of these things, but it's ridiculous that they could.

If it didn't go that far, according to Lotus, its 18-gallon fuel tanks would be empty after just 40 minutes at top speed, which is probably better because the transmission and differential would start to overheat after 30 minutes, so it wouldn't. They are designed properly. have a sense of humor, Lotus only made 320 Carlton sedans, 950 of these things in total, this was just an image maker, not a transportation device for the masses, and think of the irony of GM buying Lotus so they could use the Lotus engineering power to help make the company's image sporty and turns into a

nightmare

ofPR that backfires to the point that Vauxhall stops advertising the top speed of the world's fastest sedan, isn't it ironic?

Don't you think so, it's Alanis because she's the most amazing Fu? to a bunch of stuffy classists who on their best day couldn't understand the Carlton, thanks, okay, foreigner, foreigner, hello, hey, okay, so this car is actually a genuinely modern sports sedan. What you've never experienced, well, you should go to Hagerty's. Marketplace, which is a website where we have classified ads and auctions and maybe one of these things is for sale, maybe this thing is for sale. In fact, you'll never know unless you go. I can't understand why it's disgusting.