Lotus Engineering, the engineering consultancy division of Group Lotus, has been awarded a major industry award for its Versatile Vehicle Architecture (VVA), the platform on which the Europa is based.
Lotus Engineering won the European Aluminium Award 2006 in the "Transport and Automotive" category held at “Aluminium 2006” - 6th World Trade Fair and Conference in Essen, Germany. At “Aluminium 2006”, Versatile Vehicle Architecture technology was demonstrated by the “APX by Lotus Engineering” prototype vehicle that was first shown to the world at the Geneva Motorshow earlier this year.
The APX (Aluminium Performance Crossover) is the first example of a complete vehicle built on the innovative Versatile Vehicle Architecture (VVA) – the first Lotus production car using this technology will be the new Lotus Esprit flagship sports car to enter production in December 2009. The innovative VVA technology offers a fast-to-market, cost-effective approach to differentiated niche products by spreading the development, investment and bill of materials burden across a range of niche vehicle variants, without the compromise that stems from conventional ‘platform sharing’.
The key to the VVA architecture is the extensive use of aluminium in the form of high-pressure die cast corner nodes that are combined with extruded and pressed aluminium via bonding and mechanical fasteners. The European Aluminium Awards Jury recognised that Lotus used its knowledge in lightweight materials, such as aluminium, to its advantage to build the APX, and that Lotus satisfied the Jury’s key criteria of originality, functionality, design, durability and recyclability.
Lotus won this award back in 1996 for the Lotus Elise chassis - at the time a ground-breaking and innovative technology itself.
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