The enemy of automotive greatness is weight. Yes, it's possible to make a Porsche Panamera or big Mercedes sedan slalom down a country road, but it requires vast amounts of horsepower and a slew of adaptive this and that — suspension, brakes, steering — all frantically chattering away in code, trying to keep the damn thing on the road. And the more semiconductors between you and the asphalt, the less you can feel a car's raw, unvarnished power.
Meet the antidote: the Lotus Evora, a small, fierce, featherweight midengine sports car that makes other sports cars feel like square-wheeled oxcarts.
Lotus was founded after World War II by an English aerodynamicist named Colin Chapman who was obsessed with reducing the mass of his cars to the absolute minimum — "add lightness" is how he put it. Chapman died in 1982 and the company staggered through decades of money troubles, but in 1995 it hit gold with the Lotus Elise — a tiny midengine, aluminum-chassis two-seater weighing about two thousand pounds. Powered by a screaming little Toyota engine, the Elise is a complete joy to drive hard — crazy, laughing-like-a-lunatic fun. Its chassis-dynamics engineer ought to be the fifth head on Mount Rushmore.
The problem: The Elise is a shoe box, impossible to get into. Parking valets have been known to quit on the spot.
This year Lotus rolls out the Evora — bigger than the Elise but still small, about five inches shorter than a Porsche 911 and just over three thousand pounds. It's a midengine two-plus-two — which is to say, it has tiny little backseats like the Porsche 911 — and unlike the Elise, it has a beautiful, finely crafted interior of French-stitched En-glish leather and brushed aluminum. But in all the scaling up and civilizing of the Evora, the Lotus gospel of elemental function and light weight has been preserved.
Powered by a feverish 276-hp Toyota V-6 mounted transversely and a six-speed manual gearbox, and strung on a race-car-pure suspension of coil-overs and wishbones — not a computer in sight — the Lotus covers the ground to 60 mph in under five seconds and flits and dives from corner to corner like Rimsky-Korsakov's bumblebee. This thing corners so hard, it could peel the bark off a tree.
Lotus has patented a kind of easy, predictable balance and directness so even average drivers walk away from the car feeling like Mario Andretti. At $73,500, what you have here is the everyman's Ferrari.
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