[rcollum]

I recently read an article (most recent EVO magazine, I think) stating that the European Union's latest emissions regs make it very hard to pass with a manual transmission. They said that the regs allowed an automatic to shift whenever it was programmed to, but the manual trans cars were forced to shift at mandated speeds - and some of the mandated shift points were illogical.

In that environment, not only might Lotus need to have an automatic to sell, but it probably helps sell companies on their expertise in another arena, for the Lotus Engineering side.