Lotus Exige S 2009 Review

Road Test

Price Guide (recommended price before statutory and delivery charges): $114,990
Options fitted to test car (not included in above price): Sports Pack $6000; Performance Pack $11,000
Crash rating: untested
Fuel: 98 RON PULP
Claimed fuel economy (L/100km): 9.1
CO2 emissions (g/km): 216
Also consider: Suzuki GSX-R1000

Overall Rating: 4.0/5.0
Engine/Drivetrain/Chassis: 4.5/5.0
Price, Packaging and Practicality: 2.5/5.0
Safety: 1.0-3.0/5.0 (depending on who's at the wheel!!!)
Behind the wheel: 4.5/5.0
X-factor: 6.0/5.0

A club racer I know summed up Lotus's Elise/Exige platform: "It's a cheap way to put a racing car on a racetrack."

Well, it is a track car. But cheap? Car racing is a rich man's sport, but on the scale of roadgoing automotive consumer goods, the Exige S is far from cheap. Our test one cost $131,990 before the ACCC's Clarity in Pricing add-ons are added on... That $131K is the base price of $114,990 plus $17,000 for two of the three option packs Lotus' local connections offer.

The $6000 Sport Pack adds switchable traction control, sports seats, an adjustable front anti-roll bar and a roll-over bar with integrated racing harness points. The $11,000 Performance Pack adds bite to the Exige S.

This petrolhead makeover boosts power from 163 to 179kW via improvements to fuel flow to its 1.8-litre Magnuson/Eaton M62 supercharged Toyota/Yamaha 2ZZ engine and intake manifold tweaks. There's a bigger clutch, too, to accommodate the resulting extra torque (215 to 230Nm). More go is matched by more stop with a brake upgrade -- drilled front discs, bigger four-piston calipers and beefier pads all round. You also get variable slip traction-cum-launch control that allows you to dial in up to nine per cent slip.

The upshot: a lightweight pocket rocket that accelerates from 0-100 km/h in 4.16 seconds.

The Exige finds ample assistance here in its decidedly unample proportions. At 935 kg, it maintains the tradition embodied in Lotus founding father Colin Chapman's motto of 'performance through light weight'. The bonded aluminium tub around which it's built weighs just 68 kg.

The Exige pays homage to another Chapman performance criterion: directing passing air over, under and around it in a way that stabilises it at speed and glues it to the driver's chosen cornering line.  The deep front splitter, the flat underbelly and the rear diffuser are aerodynamically efficient and with the help of the prominent rear wing, they generate a handy 42 kg of extra downforce at 160km/h.

The other upshot: nothing attacks a corner like it. Certainly not at the price...

But travelling light means sacrifice. Which is why the Exige S gives you so much less-is-more in every other way… No glove box. No cigarette lighter cum phone charger socket. No cruise control. An overnight-bag boot. Next to no seat adjustability: maybe eight inches fore and aft, driver's side only…

The air conditioning and audio systems are paltry enough to suggest they're conceded rather than proffered with love. Electric windows? Yes, but I suspect only because the mechanisms are lighter than winders. And because they make it easier to reach the 100 per cent manually adjustable external passenger mirror (which anyone taller than a smurf will manage with ease from the driver's seat…)

Sound insulation? Not a lot, unless you fork out $8000 for the Touring Pack (that third option pack alluded to in our intro). But pleasantries like leather and an iPod connection seem superfluous on a car devoted only to acceleration and cornering. There's no power steering either. But the car hardly needs it.

Most $100K-plus cars are the products of a prodigious development spend on a decent ride/handling compromise. The Exige is not. The ride is famously hard. I'd never noticed the corrugations near Victoria Barracks until I took an Exige up Oxford Street. Take it out in the rain and you'll hear little over the hiss of tyres on wet tar.

This car's idea of family friendly comes in stickers on the sunvisors declaring that the installation of a rear-facing baby capsule in the passenger seat could have fatal consequences in the event of airbag deployment.

Shoehorn yourself into it and you're down there with the lizard's gizzards. Outsiders have to squat or kneel to talk to you through the window. The surrounding view in traffic is of doorsills and bumpers. Forget about McDonald's drive-thru. In fact, it's probably best just to forget about McDonald's, period. This cabin is not a place for the fat or the feeble. Or ladies in skirts.

That's not to say there's any shortage of nutrition for the ego. This car catapaults you into a red-carpet world of second looks, waves, smiles, headlight flashes and race invitations from kids in hot Commodores.

People want to know about it. They stop you in carparks to ask questions. It's an extraordinarily engaging piece of roadware in every way.

But especially on the road. Here, it's the most focused car you can buy. The Performance Pack-equipped Exige S is the most powerful Lotus available in Australia, save for the track-only 2-Eleven. And there by only a hair's breadth.

It's also, at 191 kW/tonne, up near the supercar ranks on power-to-weight ratio. Here's where it bears out my mate's assessment: nothing comes close to it for the money. You have to buy your way into rarefied German or Italian territory -- at several times the price -- to exceed it.

So in the right hands it fulfils its intended function with rare -- and cost-effective -- brilliance. It offers an intimacy with the road matched by little else on four wheels. But it's a brilliance that goes largely wasted on ordinary drivers – and could prove dangerous in the hands of the wrong kind of bullshit artist.

That's not to say Joe Camry can't have loads of fun with it on public roads. A ride up Macquarie Pass -- the steep, winding road connecting Wollongong with the NSW Southern Highlands -- is sex with added g-forces. But Joe Camry's driving skills are all but spent when the Exige has barely warmed to the task.

This means it demands respect at all times. For the whole point of motoring as visceral and organic as this is that it's just you, the car and the road -- no stability control or any such gadgetry beyond ABS to save you from yourself.

The traction control is a performance rather than a safety feature, allowing you to pile on the power emerging from high speed corners. But it's going into those corners that separates the drivers from the Darwin Award winners. In the UK, Lotus has turned this into a revenue sidestream with a £99 course called... Scare Yourself Sensible.

The Exige S takes some getting used to -- even starting it. Push the button on the key to unlock it and you have 30 seconds to install yourself and start up before the immobiliser immobilises. No problem if that happens -- just press the unlock button on the key. No need to remove it from the ignition; it's easy to feel your way to it.

Once you're in, it's surprisingly roomy where it needs to be. The driving position is superb. The Sports Pack seats cosset you like a cupped hand. Your legs stretch long beneath a super-tactile little Momo wheel to a set of pedals that feel bespoke in their placement. The clutch is nice and light, the aluminium gearshift snickety-click quick once you get familiar with its relatively forward angling.

Reversing out of driveways and parking spots takes patience and caution. With no rear view save for a pair of small, flat exterior mirrors, you're dependent on the kindness of strangers.

On first taking off from Lotus HQ, a piece of roof lining fell on to my head (okay, the takeoff was a bit abrupt). No big deal – it was a removable cover for the bolts holding on the hard top (that helps turn an Elise into an Exige). When it's properly installed, top quality velcro keeps it firmly in place.

The stock Toyota gear ratios are close and relatively low -- 31.3 km/h per 1000 rpm in sixth. Taking off, the engine bark is overridden by the circular-saw whine of the blower and in milliseconds it's shrieking for second. And third. And fourth.

That featherweight bodywork gives it the tractability to make it a surprisingly easy and pleasant suburban drive. In no time at all you're putting the revs to use, skipping gears and taking 90 degree corners uphill in third and even fourth without blinking.

It doesn't respond well to rip-and-stomp driving. Get 2 fast 2 furious and warning lights on the tacho ignite one, two, three (around 5500, 6000, 7500 respectively, I think) before it bangs its head on the rev limiter somewhere up around 8500. Rather, it's a car that handsomely repays attentive, sensitive inputs. So well matched is the chassis to the powertrain -- and such an intuitive joy is the gearbox -- that in no time at all you find yourself using the brake pedal only for stopping.

The soundtrack's a disappointment. The blower gives it a bit of drama on the way up, but take your foot off and your Stuka bomber turns into a Corolla.

The drivetrain isn't all it shares with Toyota. Its fuel gauge inherits the Japanese marque's idiosyncrasy of giving you hundreds of kilometres from the first half of the tank and about 20 km from the second half. Which is fine once you realise it's time to fill up when the gauge hits the half-way mark.

Lotus claims a combined-cycled fuel consumption of 9.1L/100km. I have no doubt this is within the grasp of a car as light as the Exige, but it fails to factor in the temptations it presents drivers. I skolled my way through somewhere between two and three 43.5-litre tanks of 98 RON in somewhere around 650km.

The headlights are excellent high and low, while the rear LED foglights have enough lux to deal swiftly with high-beamers behind.

One does, of course, find little touches of, err, traditional British craftsmanship. Our test car, for example, had a paint run on the inside of the driver's door. But that's just proof the Exige doesn't hail from a trillion yen, state-of-the-art 400-hectare showcase in mass production robotics, but rather a room full of real people next to an old airfield near the village of Hethel in Norfolk.

Which explains the Exige's single-mindedness. This kind of money buys some very good allrounders -- fast, luxurious, beautifully made, big-brand roadware full of underbody alphabet, satnavs, opera house sound systems, air conditioned armchairs and headlights that look round corners. Indeed, for the price of the Exige S you could have a very flash 3 Series; an IS-F; a TTS -- most with lots of options, lots of change or both.

Two Golf R32s, perhaps? Or a 135i and a sensible Aurion – that's the one with a Lotus Evora (more here /reviews/2009/prestige-and-luxury/lotus/lotus-evora-15358 ) engine thrown in. But if you're even glancing at such fare, this car lives in a universe unlikely to intersect with yours.

Lotus owners are hard to find, but easy to identify. They're the ones exchanging knowing smirks over your shoulder while you talk about your ultimate driving machine…