Yahoo Autos The Lotus Evora Is the Antidote to Bloat
This year's Performance Car Of The Year testing showcased almost all the different ways you can build a high performance car. We had front-engined cars, mid-engined cars, and a rear-engined car. We had rear-wheel-drive cars and all-wheel-drive cars. Manual transmission, dual-clutch transmission, torque-converter planetary automatic transmission. Naturally aspirated, turbocharged, supercharged. Yet not all of these differences would be readily apparent to a casual driver, and in a few cases (such as with the 911 Turbo S and its engine hung out past the rear axle) a considerable amount of engineering effort is put into masking the effects of those differences.
In fact, if you were to put the proverbial "man on the street" behind the wheel of every PCOTY contender in quick succession, he might well divide the cars into two groups. The first group would consist solely of the Lotus Evora 400; the second group would, of course, be everything else. Because while every other car in our test has succumbed to the general 21st-century automotive malady of widebody bloat, the Evora retains the interior proportions of a traditional grand-touring car.
This was something that I first noticed when we compared the Evora S to the 991-generation Porsche 911 Carrera 2S nearly four years ago. I'd driven my 993-generation 1995 Porsche 911 the day before the test, just to get back in touch with the old Porsche aesthetic and to prepare for my meeting with the new car. Imagine my surprise when I dropped into the drivers seat of the first completely fresh 911 since 1998 and found that I had a few inches of clear air between my elbow and the door card.
Gone, too, was the intimate positioning of driver and front passenger seat, separated by just five inches of what was plain carpet in the 1965 car or a vestigial console-with-cassette-holder in my '95. The narrow, upright cockpit of my Porsche made it a splendid vehicle for first dates and now makes it a lovely way to travel with Danger Girl, but the current car enforces a Puritan separation of man and wife with a massive Berlin Wall of silver-toned plastic seemingly cribbed from the Panamera sedan.
Not that Porsche is the only manufacturer to change their interior packaging from 707 to 787, mind you. Everybody does it. Each new generation of a car is wider inside, with a higher door, a thicker set of pillars, and a smaller side window. Combine that with the none-more-black philosophy of modern sporting-car cockpit design, and it's easy to see how the light and airy greenhouse of my old Porsche has become the Altimiran cave of the current car. We are told that it is necessary: to preserve our safety. To attract female buyers, who are more comfortable with less window space. To do business with the increasing number of big-and-tall customers.
Every car in our test had that cave-like-nay, let us say cavernous, for it conveys every aspect of what it is like to sit in something like a Jaguar F-Type or Audi R8-interior vibe down pat. Except, that is, for the Lotus. To sit in the Evora is to be immediately transported back in time three decades, or maybe four. The seats: close-coupled, elbow-touching over a minimal center tunnel. The steering wheel: close to hand, modestly sized like what you'd get in an SCCA Touring-class racer. The door: right there. And the doorsill is remarkably low for a mid-engined car on a backbone frame. You can see out of the Evora quite well, in three of the four cardinal directions; the rearview mirror primarily offers a fascinating and distracting view of the wastegate actuator, a milled-aluminum device that rotates provocatively behind the glass bulkhead window.
Yet as thrillingly close-coupled and shrink-wrapped as the Evora may be, it still fits your six-foot-two, 240-pound author with no difficulty, even when he wears a helmet. And there is adequate room in the rear seat for children or particularly cherished luggage. This car is as large as it needs to be, and no larger.
Every driver at PCOTY agreed that the Evora was the most thrilling car in our group to drive at even remotely sensible speeds. Much of that has to do with the analog, unfiltered nature of the communication between tire and driver that the Lotus offers in spades, but it's also due to the fact that, of all these stunning and rapid vehicles, only the Evora feels like a true sports car when you are behind the wheel. Everything else is either supercar-proportioned (the NSX, the R8) or sedan-on-steroids (the C63, the BMW, and, sadly, the 911).
The difficulty facing Lotus is that none of these sterling qualities can be measured by a stopwatch or displayed particularly convincingly on YouTube, so in an era where people judge cars based on fact and figures then leaven their opinion a bit by watching some morons clown around on their computer screen it becomes very difficult for anybody to understand why you would spend nearly a hundred thousand dollars on something that runs with a Mustang GT in the quarter-mile and lacks the visual drama of an Audi R8 or Jaguar SVR F-Type.
What you, the proverbial high-performance car buyer, need to do is this: Find your local Lotus dealer. This might be a little difficult, I admit. Then arrange to spend ten minutes just sitting in the Evora 400. You don't even need to drive it, although doing so will further and more eloquently plead the car's case. Just sit in the thing.
Take a moment to enjoy the intimacy of it: the way you can touch the passenger door with your right hand, the way all of the controls are within immediate reach. It will stir that child within you, the one who wanted to be a fighter-jet pilot or a Formula 1 driver. It is truly special in a way that no bloodless recapitulation of torque figures or lap times can explain. In an era where massive power and raw grip and computer-controlled handling appear to have carried the day, the Evora stands alone. It represents that which cannot be measured or delimited. But when you take a seat, close the door, and grasp its wheel, I believe you will understand.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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