Lotus Evora 2009 Review - International

Lotus Evora

Road Test

What we liked
>> Fabulous handling balance and poise
>> Near-perfect driving position
>> Useful, unobtrusive and advanced skid-control systems

OVERVIEW

There's more than one Lotus, for sure, but the hard-top Exige coupe is a fixed roof, hard-edged version of the tireless, original Elise… And, well, the less said about the softer, poorly conceived and much-unloved Europa (again, based off the Elise) the better… There's the 2-Eleven, too, but it's a dedicated track car and, just for something unusual, it's based off the Elise chassis.

The problem is obvious. If a nasty worm or legislation comes along to suddenly hamstring Elise architecture, Lotus is buggered. That's not all of it, though, because the Elise architecture is deep into its second decade already and, light and nimble though it makes a Lotus, there are plenty of good reasons why no other carmaker has followed it up with bonded aluminium chassis of their own.

That's why the folks at Hethel, in south-east England, have taken so much time and effort over the Evora. It's really their first all-new car since Paul Keating was Prime Minister and they want it to be seen in the same light as Porsche's scintillating Cayman S -- possibly the best pound-for-pound sportscar in the world. No sense setting your sights low, then.

To get there, or anywhere near there, Lotus needed to fit the Evora with a level of sophistication the rest of the range couldn't hope to match.

To get there, the Evora hasn't just grown up; it's grown up and out. It's easily the heaviest Lotus, weighing in at over 1340kg; it's the only four-seater (though, like a Porsche 911, the rear-seat usefulness is marginal); and it's the only one with a six-cylinder engine, too.

Using an all-new bonded-aluminium chassis, Lotus developed new electronics for a Toyota 3.5-litre V6 engine, matched it to a six-speed gearbox and mounted the whole thing across the engine bay, right behind the driver's shoulders. Well, behind the shoulders of his/her short rear-seat passengers, anyway.

Typically, Lotus develops chassis balance and suspension sophistication to within an inch of its life, but that job's been made more difficult with the Evora because it's the only Lotus with power steering and it's at least 30 per cent heavier than anything else they work on.

Evora's cabin will offer Recaros as standard equipment with the 2+2 configuration also featuring ISOFIX child anchorage points. Other cabin features include a flat-bottomed steering wheel and edge-lit bespoke controls.

There is a 160-litre boot with a cooling system to "minimise engine heat ingress".

Power windows and mirrors, aircon, full cabin trimming, etc, are all offered as standard -- a far cry from the Spartan spec of the Elise at least initially. In addition Lotus Australia will offer three optional packs to "allow personalisation to tailor the Evora for specific tastes and requirements".

The Premium Pack adds $7,900 to the price and includes accent interior lighting plus a number of leather trim and matching floor mat colours including Charcoal (black), Paprika (red), Chestnut (Tan) and Oyster (magnolia). The Tech Pack is a $8,200 option and includes cruise control and parking sensors and an advanced Alpine Imprint EQ stereo / multi-media system.

The Sport Pack fetches $3,095 and will offer switchable sport dynamic setting (see ON THE ROAD below), sports springs and dampers, cross-drilled brake discs, upgraded grilles for added cooling and painted brake callipers.

The optional packs are available separately or in combination with stand-alone options including reversing camera, electric folding mirrors, bi-xenon headlights and forged alloy Stealth grey wheels.

The tough part about measuring the relative merits of Lotus's work is that nobody else builds cars the way it does. Of the companies who build cars in any significant numbers, only Lotus bases its machines on a bonded (glued, really) aluminium sandwich chassis. Some use aluminium (most notably Jaguar, Audi, Ferrari and Lamborghini), but they weld tubes of it together, rather than gluing and riveting sheets the way Lotus does.

This can make it difficult for Lotus, because there are so few outlets for innovation to draw from, but you get the feeling that's how they like it over there in Norwich, in England's east.

Every current Lotus sits its engine crossways behind the driver and the Evora is no different. One big difference, though, is that the engine is physically larger than the four-cylinder engines in the rest of the range.

This one is a 3.5-litre V6 and, just like the rest of the range, it is drawn from the Toyota parts bin. But it's not simply been bought in and dropped in. Lotus has developed its own electronics for the engine and it has done all of its own mapping and timing and tuning, plus built its own exhaust.

The variable-valve timed engine winds up with 206kW of power @ 6400rpm, but that's nothing like the entire story. Lotus has tweaked it for torque, more than power, and while it claims 350Nm of torque at 4700rpm, it feels a lot like most of that is already alive and kicking by around 2000 revolutions per minute.

It needs torque, too, because at 1380kg, the Evora is easily the heaviest Lotus you can buy; almost double the weight of the 2-Eleven and 50 per cent heavier than an Exige. A lot of the extra weight has been piled on in search of the maturity grown-up buyers look for in things like noise, vibration, harshness, ride quality and feel. It is, for example, the only Lotus you can buy with power steering, adopting a mechanical pump to drive the hydraulics for the rack-and-pinion system.

There's a six-speed manual gearbox, too, which sits at the back of the engine and drives the rear wheels and does it, as per the insistence of Lotus's test engineers, without a limited-slip differential. Lotus insists all its cars work best without limited-slip diffs, which can stop the inside wheels from spinning when they're coming out of corners.

The way Lotus sets up its cars, LSDs tend to induce understeer. It's not flying solo on this one, though, because Porsche insists its Boxster and Cayman ranges don't need LSDs, either.

Lotus bolts forged aluminium suspension wishbones at all four corners, with precisely matched Eibach springs and Bilstein dampers doing the hard work. Massive, strong brakes sit inside the wheels, too. From long-time motorsport supplier, AP Racing, the four-piston calipers clamp down on 350mm front discs and 332mm rears.

While 18-inch wheels and 225/40 ZR18 front and 225/35 ZR19 inch rear tyres are smaller than the options you can get on other sports models, the proof is in the handling balance.

Lotus launched its own traction control on the 2-Eleven track car and while that version was variable, the system on the Evora is based on it and includes a system to neatly fix understeer and another one to counteract oversteer.

It fires up via an old-school Tibbe key that was breakthrough technology, oh, 20 years ago, and the only thing that could be construed as storage space is the oversized hole-cum-pocket in the door's armrest. To reach the mirror switch, you'll have to evolve an extra elbow or go at it with the other hand, because Lotus buried it behind the door's grab handle.
 
Then there's the window winding action, with its distinct clicking noise to switch it on, then a loud whirring followed by a hard clunk as it hits either the top or the bottom of its travel. It's like it just hits the thing without any damping at all. Then the window itself doesn't drop all the way down into the deeply chiseled door, so you're left with a little triangle of glass sticking up in the window opening and you're also left wondering which bits the development budget stretched to and which bits were done on the cheap.

That's about it for initial gripes, though. The rest is, from the start, good. And the only reason we're being so picky is that Lotus wants to play in Porsche's patch and Porsche doesn't generally ignore these sorts of things.

See, they're asking just under $150,000 for the Evora, and that's a lot of money for a brand with dealer coverage as patchy as its reputation for getting the little details right.

Fortunately, there's more to the Evora than first meets the eye.

In a usual Lotus test we would run out of things to say about the equipment on offer as soon as you opened the door handle. Not on the Evora. The heavily chiseled doors are the design highlight and, though the area just ahead of the rear wheels is distractingly busy; the design is neat enough.

The sills are incredibly wide, especially up close to the door hinge end of it, but it seems easier to climb into than the Elise. The door shape is higher in the roofline and that little bit makes all the difference.

But when you drop into the seat, all is immediately right with the world. It's not that new ground has been broken here, and it's not that it feels like an Elise or an Exige. It doesn't. It feels better than they do, like it carries on from their seating positions.

The pedals are ever so slightly offset in the right-hand drive version, and Lotus has engineered this car to be symmetrical, so I'd expect the LHD jobs to be the same. The footrest pedal is a bit of a stretch if you want to put your whole foot on it, but you can get by without that.

You drop down into a seat that feels more luxurious and immediately comfortable than it has any right to be and it's far more comfortable than it looks.

The switchgear on the right can be a touch confusing, though familiarity would almost certainly put that to rights (particularly the three light buttons), but everything else is neatly within reach, both physically and intuitively. The air-conditioning switchgear for example is not only good to look at, it's nice to touch (we kept fiddling with it, even though we didn't need to in the Arctic conditions of Scotland's Highlands).

If the front seats are just right, the rears are just there. Anybody more than about five feet tall is going to struggle on the way in and won't look graceful on the way out, either. They are, effectively, storage areas, but Porsche's 911 has used the same sort of theory for years without much complaint.

Antilock brakes are standard and as noted above a tunable stability control system is also offered.

Less impressive is the way the engine feels and sounds. It just doesn't throw up any of the menace or creaminess of the best of them and it's sure not going to impress anybody standing on the footpath or sitting in a café. It has a minor, smooth grumble at idle, but only to let you know it's sitting behind you.

Our car had around 1500 miles (well, it was an English car in the UK) on the clock, which might explain the slightly constrained feel it had whenever you blipped the throttle.

The rest of the driveline feels remarkably similar to an Exige. The six-speed manual box has the same loosely accurate feel to it with the same metallic clunks as the linkages work their way through the changes.

It's a strong, strong, natural feeling powertrain, particularly around town where you rarely use big revs anyway. The gear spacing is close, particularly from third to fifth, and you can skip the odd gear around town without losing much performance because it feels most comfortable between 2500-5500rpm.

The sound at high revs isn't thrilling, even though Lotus claims this is exactly on the noise limit allowed under EU law -- a point it makes while questioning the integrity of those supervising the Italian sportscar houses.

Drive away gently and you notice something. Power steering. You can't get it on the Elise and you certainly can't get it on the sharper Exige. And, what's more, it feels very, very good. The weighting works well around town and it works just as well when you find open country.

The weight of the steering is beautiful on turn in. It has just enough heft to let you know you're doing something serious, but not so much that you tire of it.

Indeed, only Porsche does better steering than this, and not by much. The Evora tells you beautifully nuanced details of the road beneath you, then hints clearly about what more it could give you under the circumstances. But that ain't the half of it. There's a lot more self-centring than any of Lotus's current offerings, which means it communicates better, feels more intuitive and fills you with confidence.

There are few times when you notice that this is not a conventional sportscar chassis, but mostly it just feels like all the bits have been hung off something rock solid. The way the Evora rides is a triumph of managing the conflicting goals of comfort and speed. It's no limo, for sure, but the road beneath you never intrudes harshly into the cabin.

The strong, touchy-feely brake pedal is another early clue to the quality of what lurks beneath. The take-up point is high in its travel, the pedal feels firm and remains that way: It has enormous levels of feedback from the four-piston AP calipers all the time.

But is it a sports car? Is it what you'd expect out of Lotus? The short answer is: Yes. It's actually more than you'd expect.

It's fast, reasonably good looking, ridiculously comfortable and, because there's nothing in recent Lotus history that indicates they're capable of this sort of machine, it's a fabulous surprise.

When you start to attack the twisting stuff, the Evora doesn't change character. It just delves deeper into what it has already shown you. There's enormous bite from the tyres on turn-in and it is so precisely balanced that you can steer it with your hands or your feet. You can even arrive a gear too high and it won't suffer much because the torque band is so wide.

Bumps don't upset its poise, either, and neither do camber changes or surface changes. It's brilliant. Put simply, nobody builds a sportscar with better suspension tune than this. Nobody.

But it is also user friendly. Even though this is the heaviest of all Lotuses and even though there's a big 3.5-litre V6 sitting amidships, it won't punish you if you are clumsy with the brake pedal mid-corner. It won't step sideways and it won't give you heart-in-the-mouth moments. It won't even lurch. It will just sink the outside corner into the road and bite.

Lotus has developed its own understeer-detecting skid control, which constantly studies things like the steering angle and how hard the car is cornering and from all of that, the Evora works out what it needs to do to keep the car on the road. It gets the job done so smoothly and effectively that most people will think they've recovered from their mistakes by their own skill – if they realise they've made mistakes at all.

Then it fires out the other side to the slight disappointment of the engine's unwillingness to chase not only the redline, but the power peak as well. The upside is that it's very strong in its torque band and it reacts well to short shifting.

Lotus claims it will hit 100km/h in 4.9 seconds and, while there is little doubt that it will, it doesn't feel terribly exciting on the way there. Straight lines just aren't really its thing.

And if the Evora's chassis is brilliant in its normal guise, it becomes incandescent when you fire up the Sport button. The understeer-killing function is deactivated to give you a more direct control, the Lotus engine management system delivers faster response to the throttle and the traction control will let the car slide just that bit further before it takes remedial action.

A car that was sublime before becomes electrically, entertainingly infallible. There's no body roll to speak of, bumps are still soaked up with the same dignity and aplomb (it's not one of these 'Sport' buttons that affects the shock absorbers) and it's faithful, too. It never feels like its tail will step out and frighten you, it never feels like that ultra-chatty front end will run out of grip and leave you looking silly, either.

Read the latest Carsales Network news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at www.carsales.mobi