SilverSeven

Everyone has heard about the Lotus Elise. Some knew of it from the previous generation that shocked the world with it’s mind-numbing handling and agile feel. Some first encountered it in the Gran Turismo series of games for the Sony PlayStation. Most have heard of it for the first time in the past year, when Lotus decided to start selling them in America. I got to spend 24 hours with one recently, and I thought I would share my experience for those who've wondered about this funny little car.







First Impression

When one first walks up to an Elise, the first thing that goes through your head is, “this isn’t the real car, this must just be the display model to show you what the real one will look like.” It is truly that small. The roofline is above waist height, though just barely. Included documentation claims a height of 44 inches, yet with the standard soft-top removed, it appears much lower. The shape is a huge departure from the last one, but is quite obviously inspired by it. All of the styling cues are there, but they are as different as can be. Everything from the recessed radiator vents in front to the large side scoops on the quarter panels, the separate small marker lights on the front to the quad round taillights, the swoopy rakish nose to the semi Kamm tail. It's all the same concept, different execution. It almost has the overall shape of a doorstop, a tight wedge. As striking as it is, it’s most definitely not beautiful. Not even close. It looks like a bug, and not even a pretty bug. No, it’s not going to win any beauty contests, but that is part of it’s charm. It will never be mistaken for anything else. And if it works well enough, who cares what it looks like?



Getting into the driver’s seat takes a bit of contortionism, even with the roof rolled up in the trunk. Between the high door sill, the extreme rake of the windscreen, and the fact that the seat’s sliders allow for at most 6 inches of travel, you won’t want to be getting in and out of this thing too many times in one day. Anyone over 6' tall should look elsewhere. It's possible to squeeze in if you're that big, but you won't enjoy it. Once you’re in the seat and have had a few moments to work the leg cramps out, things start to look very fairly nice. The steering wheel is small, which is a good thing since there is no tilt/telescoping in this car. The wheel is covered in a perforated leather that I’ve always felt looks cheap, but it does breathe fairly well and is grippy. The seats are tight with high bolsters and are set at a good angle, again a good thing as adjustment is very limited. The shifter is in good reach, topped with a small aluminum ball and top-hat style reverse lock-out. A glance around the cabin reveals a somewhat surreal finish. I’ve owned track only racecars that didn’t look this "racecar" inside. The amount of bare aluminum is overwhelming. Aside from (optional) mats roughly the size of what you would find in the back of your average family sedan, the floor is bare, with a large foot rest for passengers. Each door sill doubles as an armrest, and is bare aluminum topped with a rather nice bit of black plastic. The clutch makes a rather quaint “tink” when you depress it all the way. Evidently, a small rubber bumper behind it would have weighed too much. The dash is largely aluminum as well, with the glovebox consisting of nothing more than a U shaped channel reminiscent of a rain gutter on a house. The switchgear is minimal, three ***** for climate control, two buttons for lights, and the typical column mounted stuff. The large tach is centered, with no redline marked, though a small and very hard to see light does come on to indicate the approaching rev cut. My favorite thing about the interior however is rather silly. A slight stretch of the right arm allows you to roll down the passenger window, from the button on the passenger door from the driver's seat. Yes, it is that small.







Driving the Elise

After clambering in and getting settled and adjusting the seat forward slightly (the only adjustment available), it’s time to take it for a drive. Key on, clutch in, hit the starter button on the left side (a very nice touch). The Toyota 1.8 fires smoothly, with a nice deep sound coming from the short resonators. Throttle is very responsive, quick jabs at the loud pedal are instantly followed by a subdued growl directly behind your ears. The clutch is butter smooth, a surprise since it’s not one of the lightest clutches I’ve ever felt. Engagement makes anyone look like a pro. It’s not jerky of stiff, it just does what it’s supposed to do. Toodling around, the Elise is very well behaved. Many sports cars are hell to drive at low speeds, acting like two-strokes at times. This one however, feels just like a Toyota. Steering is light and direct, without the yanks over bumps that you might expect. Same with the brakes, everything in this car is just so damned smooth. I drive around like this, just cruising for the better part of an hour, just getting used to everything. Then I couldn’t take it anymore. Let’s haul ***.







Power

I find a nice deserted road far away from the morning traffic and pull to a stop. This is a moment of truth. Will I be blown away? 10.4 pounds per horsepower is nothing to sneeze at. I rev gently to around 4000rpm and feather the clutch a bit. Out of the hole, this thing sings pretty well. A few hundred more revs would have helped, but after a slight bog, we were off. Once the car is rolling, I’m a little worried that I forgot something. It just seemed to be struggling to gain speed. I look down and 5500 is approaching, but not rapidly by any means. Of well, the cam is about to hit, we’ll see what she’s really got there. 6200 and the big cam engages. There is actually a noticeable lurch as this happens, but I’m still not excited. It seemed calm, relaxed. It’ll go fast, just give it time. I run through a few more gears in this manner. Eventually I’m coming up on 120mph, so I shut down. I pulled to the side of the road to think about what just happened. Now, I know the Elise isn’t about straight line speed, but I was expecting a bit more than that. Later in the day, I pulled an older Mustang GT by about a car. Power is surely not this car’s strong point. I abandon my little asphalt retreat to find some twisty (and hopefully equally empty) roads.







Handling

Since this is what the Elise was built for, I had extremely high hopes. My first few fast corners were rather tentative. I didn’t want to push the limits all at once until I got to know it’s traits. As I said before, the steering is light, probably the lightest I’ve felt. Feedback is excellent, you can tell exactly what the front tires are doing at any given time. Unfortunately, most of the time at the limit, the front tires are plowing through the corners with the worst understeer I have ever experienced. The worst thing a car can do to me is understeer, and this one did it almost every time I got near the limits of traction. It wasn’t a gentle, progressive understeer either. No, you could enter a corner, turning the wheel gently, and you would just get to a point where the turning radius ceased to tighten no matter how much more lock you gave it. Admittedly, this trait has probably kept many inexperienced Lotus owners out of ditches, but it still takes away a lot of the fun for me. The twitchiness makes it very exciting at 8/10s, but for an all out race car, I want it a bit more neutral or even loose at the absolute limit. The front needs more grip, that’s all. Oddly even though it wants to understeer so much, snap oversteer is still a concern with it once you do manage to get the back end out. The fastest way around a corner in this car is to overdrive it, which can wear you out quickly, and you really have to be on the ball here. Once you've got a bit of a drift going, it's not very forgiving. It's short wheelbase and light nose are the primary causes of that. I changed my driving style considerably, yet still I never felt at home in the car. It was never intuitive. I was constantly fighting the car to make it go where I wanted it to go. In the end that hurts lap times. It's unpredictable at the limit, and that's the worst feeling you can have in a car like this. I spent the entire day driving this car. I put it into every situation I could, decreasing radius corners, off camber powersliding, tail-out downshifts, everything. And there was not one instance that I felt that the car was perfectly suited to the occasion. There was always potential left that was unavailable because of fairly simple tuning issues. I left very disappointed, to say the least.







Braking

When you want to lose speed in a hurry, this car drops anchor. That’s all there is to it. The braking in this car is magnificent. Unbelievably powerful, perfectly balanced, responsive, and did not fade once during the entire day. Almost gave me nosebleeds. Out of the entire car, the brakes are the only thing that are 100% spot on, better than I expected, and should never be touched. I’d probably put pads on anyway, because I’m like that, but they don’t need it.







Ride Comfort and Aesthetics

Now we get to the most dismal part of all. Now granted, this car isn’t supposed to be the lap of luxury, nor is it supposed to coddle you and take away from the driving experience. But it’s truly terrifying how bad it is. Down the list, the ride isn’t stiff, it actually feels good for the most part, but drive over anything on the road surface larger than a Bic pen and the chassis makes horrible noises. Changing lanes over the little lane marker dots made me think I’d dropped the entire suspension out on the road somewhere. The rattles were the worst. Then you have the seats, While they do hold you in place very well while understeering through the bends, they still feel a bit floppy. Like the thin gauge aluminum that they were made of just isn’t up to the job of staying rigid. A lumbar pillow would be a good investment for any trip longer than 45 minutes. The pedals are too closely spaced, making heel/toe downshifts that I’m used to doing a chore to do properly, yet there is so much engine braking that they are needed to drive fast smoothly. Storage space, though largely unimportant on a car like this is still horrendous. If you have the top stowed, there’s roughly enough room left over in the boot for a briefcase or backpack, and maybe a half-eaten biscuit. It’s that bad.



Then of course, there are other, more serious problems. Vegas is hot, we all know that. So a car with a good climate control system is somewhat important, even if the car’s primary purpose is to race. The Elise is really really bad at that. One thing that is unavoidable is the fact that the radiator is in the front of the car. So what, right? Well, the engine has to pump the hot coolant from the back of the car all the way to the front and into the radiator. The problem with that is that the hot coolant is piped right through that aforementioned armrest/doorsill. The naked aluminum one. Suffice it to say, wearing shorts while driving (or even riding in) the Elise is a bad idea. The next deficiency with the climate control is again related to the radiator. When you have a car such as this, you want to ride around with the top off. It just makes sense. However, after a day in the car with the top off, even with the A/C on max the entire time, I still felt that I was about to keel over from heat stroke. At one point, I rushed into the restroom at Aston Martin for fear that I was going to throw up from the heat. It wasn’t until that night, when the outside temps had dropped to the low 80s that I found out what the problem was. Even with the A/C on full blast at pretty nice temps outside, I was sweating profusely. I had my arm stretched out of the window, with my hand well out into the cool wind. For whatever reason I reached up and put my hand on the windscreen frame, and it was actually too hot to hold onto. I moved my hand around and there was a pocket of hot air surrounding the whole windscreen, neatly being forced into the cabin from the radiator vents in the hood. All of the air entering from outside was being heated by the radiator. With the top on, it’s comfortable. I’ll bet that unless it’s under 70 degrees outside, that car is going to be hot with the top off. Add to that the fact that “full blast” when taking about this A/C is a bit misleading. Maxed out, it’s blowing less air than most cars on the slowest or second slowest setting. Plus, now this is a minor gripe, but the A/C doesn’t stay on when when you restart the car. Everytime you turn it on, you have to push the A/C button to activate it, or else you get hit with really hot air, and given the other issues with that, it’s downright miserable.



To sum up, I wanted one before this. There was one at Norm Baker on Sahara that I nearly signed papers on. I’ve changed my mind. Knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t give $30k for it, much less the $50k plus that everyone seems to be asking now. It’s a good car, but not great, not really noteworthy. It’s performance isn’t at a level that would let me overlook the shortcomings of actual usability, and it’s not cheap enough to get over the bad traits it has. It is a huge experience, driving around in a Lotus. The cute girl at McDonald's looked like she was about to wet herself. Whenever I stopped anywhere, gas station, pizza place, parking lot, anywhere, people flocked over in droves, asking everything from "how do you like it?" to "is it yours?" to "you aren't from around here, are ya?" Everyone stops and stares at you when you drive past. You know you’re no going to pull up next to another car just like your’s anytime soon. This leaves me in a bind, because I know that for the money, there are almost no other new cars that can keep up with it, but I still feel it’s a rip-off. Maybe I’m just spoiled, because I know for a fact that my FD could run circles around the Elise, for less than half the money. It has 90% of my FD’s handling capability, but with MR2 power. It’s overpriced, underpowered, badly balanced, and utterly useless for anything resembling daily driving.



Bottom line, I’m out of the Lotus market. At least until the Exige comes to our shores.



More Pics.....

DJ Rotor

Interesting perspective.



I'm confirmed then in my opinion that I'd rather get an Esprit

trianglepower

I would rather have an Esprit as well, but the Elise is a badass car. A friend rode in one at an autox. He said it was a wicked ride. If I could afford an Esprit, I would probably have on of these as well.

inanimate_object

Very interesting and fair ***** for putting in the effort to write that - With most people raving about Elises it's actually nice to hear from someone who doesn't like one being brutally honest



I was surprised you found it ugly, most people seem to like them. The only Elise I was in was an s1, IIRC the pedals were close in that too but I just heel-toed with each side of my foot which worked fine. You're right about the understeer, it's down to the narrow tyres, Elises were always a handful on the limit and the one thing you didn't get to find out is that they start to fall apart - but I'd still have one . I think it's down to roads in the states are just too wide and straight for them.



And I doubt you'll like the Exige any better, it's heavier and slower although the ride apparently is softer. I'm pretty sure I heasd that Ariel atoms are being imported to Cali, I doubt you'd find them slow!



Mark