Lotus Exige vs Ferrari GTC4

What's the difference?

Driving naked is ill-advised, and possibly illegal, but taking a spin in the Lotus Exige 350 Sport is as close as you'd ever want to get. It's not so much that you feel you've left your clothes at home, but that the car has shed its accoutrements, and indeed its very flesh, leaving you with a kind of skeletal vehicle; just bare bones and muscle.

What this punishingly hard and fiercely focused machine does to your bones and flesh is best described as extreme chiropractry - in particular the stress of ingress and egress - but fortunately it makes up for the moans, bangs and bruises by fizzing your adrenal glands in a big way.

The question is whether the fun is worth the suffering, and the  $138,782.85 price tag.

You want a V12 Ferrari, but you have growing responsibilities. A strictly two seat supercar just isn't quite right when kids start to arrive.

Sure, you can add a Ferrari F12 to your collection, and pick up a Merc-AMG family truckster to cover the functional stuff.
 
But it's not the same. You want to have your Italian torta, and eat it, too. Enter the Ferrari GTC4Lusso, the prancing horse’s latest take on a rapid, luxurious, four seat coupe, able to leap continents in a single bound without so much as a bead of perspiration forming on its forehead.

It's fast, suitably furious, and able to accommodate family or friends on a fast blast to anywhere you choose to go. And as usual with Maranello’s finest, the name says it all.

'GT' stands for Gran Turismo (or Grand Tourer), 'C' is short for Coupe, '4' relates to the number of people it accommodates, 'Lusso' means luxury, and of course, Ferrari is Italian for fast.