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Elisa Artioli is the namesake of the Lotus Elise.
(Lotus)
The last make Elise sports car to be sold has been delivered to its new owner, Elisa Artioli. Yes, that Elisa. The one whose name is on the car.
The lightweight roadster, which debuted at the 1995 Frankfurt Motor Show, was named after Artioli by her grandfather Roman, who was chairman of the British automaker at the time. Lotus has a tradition of naming its vehicles with words that start with E, like the Esprit and Elan.
Roman Artioli named the Elise after his granddaughter, Elisa.
(Lotus)
The young Artoli even played a role in its reveal, sitting in it as they removed the cover during its presentation when she was just two and a half years old.
“They trained me to say, ‘I am Elise!’” Elisa told Hagerty, “and they put me under a cover for some time at home, so I wouldn’t be scared on the day of the presentation.”
She told Car Magazine that she’d reached out to Lotus in 2019 when she heard a rumor the car would be going out of production and asked if she could buy the final one, which she ordered as a Sport 240 model finished in Championship Gold.
That makes two she has in her garage in Italy, as she still owns the silver one her grandfather gave to her when she was four.
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The Elise was sold in the U.S. from 2005 to 2011 and Lotus produced just over 35,000 during its production run from 1996 to 2021. It built one more after Artioli’s that will remain in the company’s museum.
The automaker plans to replace it with an all-electric model in the coming years.
