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Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman founded the Lotus Engineering Company in 1952 in order to build race cars,
and over the decade, Lotus has become known and loved for manufacturing small British sport and race
cars. Lotus models have been represented in the 3 inch scale of diecast cars, with many manufacturers
producing a small scale Lotus, including Hot Wheels, Tomica and Johnny Lightning. Although recently,
Lotus has appeared to have joined up with Matchbox, to produce some of their latest models.
Lotus Elise from the Matchbox Best of British 2007 Line.
Back in the Lesney era of Matchbox, a Lotus Europa was created by Matchbox and then no further Lotus's
were made until 2000, when Matchbox (now in the Tyco era) released the Lotus Elise. The Elise is one of
my favourite castings of that era and thakfully it is still with us today and it has appeared as recent as
the 2007 Best of British line (pictured above). No new Lotus models were released by Matchbox until 2007,
when Matchbox released a model of the Exige, followed by the Evora in 2008 and the Europa, which is scheduled
for 2009. The Exige and Evora are excellent castings, as I suspect the Europa will be excellent too. However
the Evora is a key example of the connection between
Matchbox and Lotus. In 2008 Lotus were scheduled to launch the Evora at the 2008 British Motor Show and had
arranged with Matchbox to make a special run of models that could be handed out at the show. Due to the name of
Evora being kept secret until the launch, the Matchbox Evora has been called the 'Lotus 08'. For such as small
manufacturer it is rare to see so many models from the same car company, but they are all welcome in my collection.
Below is a list of all the Matchbox Lotus models that I have in my collection. My full collection of Lotus models
can be found here.
| Lotus Elise - (Yellow) | Matchbox 00 Regular #69 |  | | Scale: 1:55 | Year: 1999 | | Cost: £0.99 | MB 440 | | | | Lotus Elise - (Blue) | Matchbox 02 Regular #24 |  | | Scale: 1:55 | Year: 1999 | | Cost: £0.99 | MB 440 | | | | Lotus Elise - (Orange) | Matchbox 07 Best Of British #01 |  | | Scale: 1:55 | Year: 1999 | | Cost: £1.99 | MB 440 | | | | Lotus Europa - (Blue) | Matchbox Lesney Superfast |  | | Scale: 1:64* | Year: 1969 | | Cost: £0.50 | | | | | Lotus Europa Special - 1972 - (Lime) | Matchbox 09 10 Pack Batch D |  | | Scale: 1:64 | Year: 2008 | | Cost: £0.89 | MB 761 | | | | Lotus Europa Special - 1972 - (Blue) | Matchbox 09 10 Pack |  | | Scale: 1:64 | Year: 2008 | | Cost: £0.80 | MB 761 | | | | Lotus Evora - 2008 - (Silver) | Matchbox 08 Regular #10 |  | | Scale: 1:60 | Year: 2008 | | Cost: £0.99 | MB 750 | | | | Lotus Evora - 2008 - (Orange) | Matchbox 10 Regular #08 |  | | Scale: 1:60 | Year: 2008 | | Cost: £1.00 | MB 750 | | | | Lotus Evora - 2008 - (Red) | Matchbox 10 Regular #08 |  | | Scale: 1:60 | Year: 2008 | | Cost: £1.00 | MB 750 | | | | Lotus Exige - (Black) | Matchbox 07 10 Pack |  | | Scale: 1:56 | Year: 2005 | | Cost: £0.80 | MB 706 | | | | Lotus Exige - (Yellow) | Matchbox 07 Regular #12 |  | | Scale: 1:56 | Year: 2005 | | Cost: £0.99 | MB 706 | | |
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