With the Lotus Emeya saloon now on the market, Lotus has chosen to put the spotlight on a previous four-door concept that didn’t make it past the scale model stage. At the end of the 1970s, Colin Chapman was taking the marque upmarket with the Esprit and front-engined GT cars, and the natural progression appeared to be to add a flagship saloon to the range.

Italian Paolo Martin was one of the designers commissioned to create a design proposal, and in a recent video posted on Lotus Cars’ own YouTube channel, he’s interviewed about the project and we get to see the initial sketches – including one that was discounted on the grounds of being too futuristic – as well as the scale model. For the latter, there were two separate proposals. Either way, it was due to be powered by a V8 engine, possibly the one that was mooted for the Esprit but didn’t become reality until the late 1990s.

History tells us that the Lotus 2000 never entered production, but Chapman’s ambition to create a four-door Lotus saloon has been fulfilled by the Emeya. We wonder how history would have viewed the Lotus saloon 40 years on had it gone into production.