2006 Lotus Exige Reviews

With its hardcore sportscar focus, the company's products are sometimes seen as too impractical for everyday use — too challenging just to get in and out, with little space for luggage and spartan comfort levels. They are weekend toys to take to a track.It's all true. There isn't a more awkward car to enter than a Lotus Exige, and once there, it's noisy and cramped. The ride is crashy and cargo space negligible. Features that would be standard elsewhere are options or unavailable. So whippet-like is the Exige, it makes even other sportscars look like Saint Bernards.However, what's surprising about this is not that few people go for this approach, but that more people do not. Lotus offers something unique among sportscars and all the attributes that are recited as drawbacks are exactly what appeals to us.We discovered this over a week with an Exige S, when our initial doubts about its suitability as daily transport were quickly overtaken by a delight in its raw, connected driving experience.The Exige S puts a supercharged version of a 1.8-litre four-cylinder Toyota engine within the existing Exige body shape, which is shared with the Elise.The loan car lifted the $114,990 starting price to $136,000 by fitting all three option packs. The Touring pack adds front airbags, some leather trim and carpets, while the two Sports packs add racing seats, traction control and roll hoops, plus lightweight alloys and adjustable dampers and front anti-roll bar.The Exige is tiny — at 3.8m long it's only a few centimetres longer than a Toyota Yaris — and very, very low at 1.16m, but with a dramatic shape that means it stands out like a true exotic should.From the driver's seat, the gawps of other road users are not always obvious because you are viewing the world from axle height. The wide sill, over which you must carefully step to get in, effectively becomes an armrest.The racing seats were a good fit, which was just as well because the only concession to varying driver size is fore-aft slide. A tiny Momo steering wheel, simple controls and plenty of bare metal give the cabin its special race car ambience. Only the garish and fiddly stereo strikes the wrong note.There is some luggage capacity behind the engine bay, in an awkwardly shaped 112-litre recess that is unconvincingly lined and has wires intruding. Two soft weekend bags would be your lot.The most obvious difference between this car and a standard Exige is the supercharger plumbing, which sucks in air from a vent in the roof and completely obscures the rear window. It takes a while to retune our normal reflexes in favour of the widely placed wing mirrors. They do the job, but reversing isn't easy.The basis for the engine in this car has already appeared in the Elise 111R, although supercharging changes it completely. It's a high-tech unit with trick valve timing and an electronic throttle, although it takes a little while to warm up.Even then, it can be rough and uneven at idle with occasional rev surges. It sounds raucous and a little highly strung, perhaps, but rasps and rips compellingly through its rev range, with peak power of 162.5kW at 7800rpm and the ability to reach 8500rpm in two-second bursts. The higher it revs the sweeter it gets, if a crazed bandsaw can be described as sweet. Peak torque of 215Nm also arrives high at 5500rpm, although there's enough above 2000rpm to make it surprisingly driveable at commuting speeds in high gears.Lotus is famous for achieving performance with small engines by keeping weight down, but this engine takes the Exige into another league. Flat out it will reach 100km/h in 4.3 seconds — as quick or quicker than supercars costing two or three times as much and boasting at least two more cylinders. With only four pistons, the Exige sips premium like a hatchback, averaging 9.1 litres per 100km.The Exige loses out only on top speed, which for a car this quick off the mark is a relatively modest 238km/h. This is despite obvious attention to aerodynamics with a front splitter, rear diffuser, flat underbody and prominent fixed wing. Oddly, the drag coefficient is a remarkably high 0.434.Lotus's aluminium skeleton can take much of the credit for keeping weight low — even fully optioned the Exige tips the scales at just 949kg. Nearly two-thirds of that sits over the rear axle, getting power to the ground with authority through 17-inch alloys and street-legal competition tyres.With 16-inch wheels at the front, this car delivers superb grip with cornering speeds limited largely by driver nerve.The Exige stays very flat and thumps its wheels down into any road irregularities, giving rise to — unwarranted — concern about the hardiness of the alloys.Encounter a big pothole through a fast corner and it can even throw the front wheels off line.However, the unassisted steering is so direct and precise the driver is never in doubt about what the road is like and how much to turn the wheel.It has drawbacks, such as heaviness when parking or a slight tendency to tramline, but they are a price we willingly pay.An unmediated connection with the car runs through all the Exige controls, with great brake, throttle and clutch weight from perfectly placed pedals. The gearshift can be a little sticky when cold, but has a no-nonsense mechanical character that makes it a delight to use.Lotus announced production cutbacks recently but also an intention to produce three new models between now and the end of 2009. These include a new flagship Esprit, a new mid-range car and a Lotus-Proton high-performance model.Meanwhile, the new Europa, which features a different body on the same platform as the Exige/Elise but with more equipment and greater claims to comfort, appeared at the Sydney motor show.One danger in a bigger model line-up is departing from core Lotus values, but if the Exige S is anything to go by, we doubt that will happen.The real challenge for Lotus will be to meet heightened safety expectations — with additional airbags, for example - without adding a lot of weight to its newer models.Meanwhile, as most cars get increasingly complex and impose a suite of software between driver and road, there is no disguising the bareback nature of a Lotus.As the company makes more models, then more people might rediscover the excitement of being behind the wheel.

But a supercar it is not; the Exige S literally does not fit the bill.There are few cars that offer the performance of the new Exige S for under $300,000, and none have a tiny supercharged 1.8-litre Toyota engine capable of supercar speed. But for $114,990, the Exige S is only fractionally slower than a Lambo, Ferrari and Porsche Turbo on the straight – and can whip all of them through the corners.This is the fastest production car Lotus has ever built, and oddly enough, it is the most refined on both road and track. Adding a supercharger and some mod-cons has heightened what was already a visceral, intense experience.There are only a few subtle differences in appearance between the atmo Exige and Exige S; body-coloured front splitter, LED taillights, a small S badge by the A-pillar, and a little mailbox chute to suck air into the intercooler, which is roof-mounted for direct airflow to the mid-mounted engine.Unfortunately, the intercooler blocks what little view there ever was in the rear view mirror, which now looks a wall of black casing and is only good for checking your own reflection.But vanity aside, the lack of vision is a compromise that many Lotus buyers will be willing to make for the performance. There is nothing quite like the wail of a Lotus at full welly, but with the supercharger sitting directly behind the driver’s ears, it now hisses and spits like an angry Amazonian python.Gone too is the long, loud wait until the 1.8-litre Toyota Celica engine comes onto its cams and picks up power.The usual surge at 6500rpm is almost imperceptible, replaced by low-down torque and a less peaky powerband. The increase in power is modest on paper: 21.5kW over the standard car at 162.5kW, and up 34Nm to 215. But add that to a car weighing just 935kg, and you have a missile that sprints 0-100km/h in 4.3 seconds. That’s faster than a Porsche 911 Carrera.The interior shows some more marked improvements over the Exige, with a focus on touring as well as performance. It is still an epic contortion process to get in and out of the thing, but once behind the wheel there is a more resolved, sophisticated air to the cabin.Air itself is kept out with more wind proofing and cabin damping, and surfaces once left bare are covered with felts, suedes and plastics. The funky sueded dash is replaced by a coarse plastic cover, but it hides the new standard dual airbags. Seating is improved for the smaller driver – not so much for the taller punter – with a new set of ProBax seats that sit higher in the tiny cabin, but provide more support in the lumbar area for longer drives.And while longer drives may seem like a masochistic proposition a car purpose-built for a twisty track, the performance add-ons actually make for a more liveable, all-round vehicle.On a bumpy country road outside of Goulburn for the launch this week – and far away from both the Wakefield Park track and smooth Hume Highway – the Exige S showed remarkable poise. And ironically, one of the test cars wearing hardcore optional Touring, Sport and Super Sport enhancement packs, rode better than the standard car.The three option packs are the only Exige options apart from metallic paint, traction control and a LSD.The luxury Touring pack ($8,000) adds leather, electric windows, driving lights, additional insulation, a second cupholder (small lattes only please) and an upgraded stereo.The Sport pack ($6,000) consists of racing ProBax seats, a cross-bar for racing harnesses, and switchable traction control, with the whol hog Super Sports pack ($7,000) adding one-way adjustable Bilstein dampers, adjustable ride height and front anti-roll bar, and lightweight seven-spoke black alloys.Both the standard suspension and the Super Sport suspension setting was the same on the day, but dampers alone made a huge difference to ride quality on the road.And while it still revs hard all the way to 8200rpm, and sounds like a bomb blast while doing it, the S is happy to cruise in sixth up and down hills at a stately 3500rpm with enough poise to enable a full conversation without even raising the voice. The track is another story.The Elise and Exige have always been the king of corner speed, with the tuned suspension and rack offering purist handling and the low weight of the car allowing speed and agility. Supercharging just makes it all happen a lot faster.Despite the traction control, the S will respond like a dog on heat every time you sic it on the apex, but too much enthusiasm or lingering on the brakes still produces lengthy slides. Get the balance right, and the amount of speed able to be held through a corner is simply phenomenal.Cornering in the Super Sport car was slightly more predictable, less twitchy in the rear if too much speed was applied. And when the tyres let go, it is catchable, controllable, and hilariously fun.So it remains in my mind as a track car for the road – but the Exige S is a car you would drive to, from and in between days on the track.Lotus Cars Australia expect a modest increase in sales from last year’s 60 cars to about 120, aided by both the Exige S and the upcoming Europa, which will feature alongside the S at October’s Australian International Motor Show.A grand touring version of the Exige, the Europa is the car to reduce the compromise between performance and livability, aimed more toward real-world performance while the Exige S stays focused on the straight and narrow track.But for the moment, the most hardcore, fastest production car Lotus has ever built is also the one with the least compromise.This review and much more will feature in The Sunday Telegraph CARSguide section on August 27, 2006.