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Lotus to invest £500 million to build Esprit, Eterne, Elite & Elan. 1900 new jobs

The new Lotus Esprit Dany Bahar – Lotus boss – revealed plans at last year’s Paris Motor Show to turn Lotus in to an East Anglian Aston Martin. Those plans included one car we knew about – the new Lotus Esprit – and a number we didn’t – the Lotus Eterne, Lotus Elite, Lotus Elan and a new Lotus Elite. But the plans seemed to be nothing more than a wish list, and although it was intimated that Lotus owners Proton were going to provide a war chest of £770 million to fund the development, that later appeared to be an intent to provide Lotus with funds to develop a new range of cars, rather than an actual commitment.

McLaren tease the New F1 (P12)

With a debut at the Paris Motor Show on 27th September, McLaren releases the first teaser photo of their new hypercar. We’ve been anticipating the reveal of the new McLaren F1 – the McLaren P12 – for some time, and expected it to appear at Pebble Beach last month. The new car at Pebble Beach turned out to be the McLaren X-1 (although McLaren did take an iPad presentation of the new F1 for the delectation of the privileged few) but now we know for certain that the new McLaren will get its public debut at the 2012 Paris Motor Show.

125th Anniversary of the Automobile: Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler put the world on wheels

The world marks the 125th anniversary of the invention of the automobile on Jan. 29. Karl Benz filed a patent for a three-wheeled vehicle driven by a gasoline engine in Mannheim, Germany, on that day in 1886, the same year Gottlieb Daimler completed his motorized carriage in Cannstatt, Germany.