Ron Hickman Ron Hickman Ronald Price Hickman OBE (21 October 1932 – 17 February 2011) was a South African-born, Jersey-based car designer and inventor who designed the original Lotus Elan, the Lotus Elan +2 and the Lotus Europa, as well as the Black & Decker Workmate. Hickman was born in Greytown, Natal, South Africa, where he worked as a courthouse clerk after leaving high school. He moved to London in the 1950s where he was employed by a music publisher. From 1954 Hickman worked for the Ford Motor Company at Dagenham first as a clay modeller and later he helped to style
Lotus Cars Bianco, who proposed a new and separate United States sales company for Lotus. By creating an unprecedented tax-incentived mechanism wherein each investor received a specially personalised Lotus Turbo Esprit, the new American company, Lotus Performance Cars Inc. (LPCI), was able to provide fresh capital to the Group Lotus in the United Kingdom. Former Ferrari North America general manager John Spiech was brought in to run LPCI, which imported the remarkable Giugiaro-designed Turbo Esprit for the first time. US sales began to quickly jump into triple digits annually. Chapman died of a heart attack on 16 December 1982 at the age