2010 Lotus Evora
Let’s face it, historically to be a Lotus road car owner you needed to suffer for your art. Lotus road cars always yielded pretty uncompromising performance, but that performance invariably came at the cost of comfort, or day-to-day driveability, or even build quality. In short, your Lotus was a car you went out and rung out—usually by yourself!—on the weekend. If you wanted practical, you didn’t buy a Lotus. At least this was my mindset, before I spent a full day driving the new Lotus Evora in and around San Diego, California.
In short, the Evora is the car you always wished Lotus would build—an exemplary performing road car that you’d actually want to drive every day. Built around Lotus’s extremely light and rigid (26,000Nm/degree!) all-aluminum monocoque, the Evora features a front subframe that carries the suspension and serves as a deformable structure in the event of an impact. Nestled mid-ship (where else?) is a transversely mounted, 3.4-liter, fuel-injected Toyota V6 that after being tweaked by the engineers at Lotus, produces 276-hp and 258-ft-lbs of torque. Now, you might think that this isn’t very much, with numerous performance cars now boasting 500-hp or more. Keep in mind, however, the Lotus mantra of light weight. The Evora weighs in at just 3,000-lbs, yielding a net power-to-weight ratio of 11lbs per horsepower. The result of this amount of power in such a light car is a 0-100-mph time of 12.3 seconds and a top speed of 162-mph—all while yielding 22-mpg/city and 43-mph/hwy!! However, the proof of the Evora is in the driving.
Climbing behind the wheel of the Evora, I was struck by two first impressions. First, it was actually comfortable! No crazy seat angles to make the driver fit inside the tub, no cramped or uncomfortable sitting positions. The driver sits in a leather-covered, racing-style seat that is both comfortable and supportive. The cockpit is ergonomically laid out with the driver in mind, rather than as a necessary evil in some earlier Lotus road cars that I’ve experienced. The second shocking realization is the build quality. The interior is really nicely finished. I can remember sitting in an Esprit where the badge was mounted so crooked on the center console, it defied all logic how it could have made it out of the factory that way. When I asked the owner about it, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Eh, you have to make certain concessions when you own a Lotus.” Not so with the new Evora, the interior is built to worldclass standards—finally!
Puttering around the traffic-filled streets of downtown San Diego, the Evora is pleasantly docile. Clutch action is communicative, but not overtly heavy or tiring. The Toyota engine, as one would expect, is eminently tractable, which means that the Evora can start and stop through workaday traffic without exhausting the driver. In the city, it’s just a sexy-looking commuter car, but once we get out on the open back roads, the Evora’s true character begins to shine through. While she may be a mild-mannered librarian in the city, on open roads she transforms into some fantasy-laden mash-up between an exotic dancer and an Olympic gymnast. Carving (and I mean carving) through twisty two-lane roads that weave through the surrounding mountains, the Evora fells like a formula car. Light, nimble, infinitely flexible, I was able to drive through switchback corner combinations at obscene speeds, without even coming close to the edge of the car’s performance envelope. I had reached my limit, but she was hardly even getting warmed up!
Wanting to test the validity of Lotus’s claim that the Evora can stop from 60-mph to 0 in a chiropractor-inducing 2.4-seconds, I looked over at my co-driver and asked, “You mind if I do a brake check?” He nodded and then proceeded to fold his arms over his chest, as if he were preparing for an emergency landing. Apparently he’d done this before. I dipped the clutch and firmly drove down on the brake pedal. For a moment, I was certain that my eyeballs were going to shatter the windscreen…it takes but 110-ft to arrest the Evora’s progress. Even more amazingly, I never even got into the ABS assist, it stopped that quickly just with threshold braking, I can’t imagine what it could do if I really just stood on the binders and let the computer take over.
By the end of the day, I had driven the Evora for about five hours and yet didn’t feel like I had done four rounds with Mike Tyson. With a starting price of $72,990, I can honestly say this is the first Lotus road car that I would really want to own…and I really want to own one!
Reviewed by Casey Annis
