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.
Photo: Richard Prince
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.
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