Views - Edge of Darkness

In broad terms there are two types of people in the world. In one camp, the people for whom the only difference between a Zanussi and a Zonda is the brand name and cost. The people for whom a car is nothing more than a fairly costly appliance. In the other camp, the people for whom cars have an intrinsic fascination and worth that is hard to quantify. For these people, a car’s ability to move something between two places is fundamentally subordinate to how it looks, sounds and behaves as it moves.

Automaniacs (those in the second camp) generally select cars by thinking first of all about the really important questions like: “How will owning one of only 250 Porsche Sport Classics make me feel?” Some of them, however, will stray from the light and also wonder, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a ’76 Aston Martin Lagonda in the garage?”

Car makers know this and as a result devote considerable time to the creation not just of beautiful future classics but also of “Cars that you shouldn’t want, but do.” A case in point is the Range Rover Sport. On a purely practical level you shouldn’t buy a Range Rover Sport because it doesn’t answer any need better than an LR3 or a Range Rover HSE does. A purist wouldn’t pick one either because those same two alternatives both look better and drive better.

I want badly to be a connoisseur of fine automobiles, to reject the ill-proportioned and ill-conceived, to have a fantasy garage that resembles a Coys catalogue, but I’m not. I fall victim to the love that dares not speak it’s name. I know I shouldn’t want a Jeep Wrangler with a six inch lift and a Golden Eagle painted on the bonnet because they’re old, creaky, lean like a holed frigate and look like a surprised spider. But I do want one.

I also know I shouldn’t really think about Noble M600s because they’re not as pretty as an Aston Martin, the engine’s from an SUV and having a dial that controls the power provided by your engine is only a good idea on a microwave. But I strongly suspect that the moment you close the door from the driver’s seat in an M600 you enter a parallel world free from the leash of mortgage payments, dental appointments and cholesterol.

There’s a type of Porsche Cayenne called the Transsyberia that I know is an aberration, not least for its name. But despite forcing myself to sit down and look at pictures of Sir Stirling Moss in 722 while watching the opening scene of The Italian Job, I still want to take two and half tons of back and orange madness out onto a public highway. I’m not at all confident that I would be able to resist the temptation to smoke the tyres frequently. I harbour a secret desire to take one to Pebble Beach Concours and perform doughnuts around the canape tables.

Every decade throws up it’s rogue’s gallery of temptations. In the eighties it was anything Ford made that included the letters XR, but particularly the XR4i. In the Nineties it was those Volkwagens with a supercharger that was in some way I don’t understand shaped like a letter “G”. In the first decade of the 21st century steroidal Mercedes saloons began to get preposterous enough to catch my eye and now in 2010 it’s all I can do to stop myself typing Audi Q7 into Google Images.

The signature of real automaniacs, the people whose love of cars is deep and a little worrying, is this secret desire to experience the left-of-field, less refined and downright vulgar. The mark of the truly damned is not the immaculate and irreproachable collection of Italian sportscars displayed in the beautifully lit coach-house, but the slightly shabby Lamborghini LM002 in the barn. It’s the half second pause at the full-page advertisement for Overfinch that betrays them, the quickened pulse at the mention of Vauxhall VXR8s.

The automotive world encompasses immense variety. At it’s extremes lie the wondrous and the despicable but every increment between the two is marked somewhere. The task of the automaniac is to represent in their garage a glimpse of this spectrum. And that is why, once the DB4GT Zagato and the Lotus Elite have been located I shall be on the look-out for a nice Bricklin SV1.

Views - Evo-Hybrids

On a recent trip to Seattle, bastion of American environmentalism, I was thoughtfully provided with a Toyota Prius as a rental car. To be honest, apart from the fact that it looks like you're driving around in Julius Caesar's nose, it wasn't a bad piece of kit. It's true that the only real excitement to be derived from driving a Prius lies in needlessly accelerating in order to brake heavily and see the little green regenerative energy symbols appear on the electronic screen. However, as an appliance it works quite well.

Despite it’s growing popularity I’ve decided that the Toyota is doing the hybrid concept some injustice. Whilst mating batteries and internal combustion engine is a polite dinner party way to approach the subject, there’s a long history of more exciting examples. The possibilities arising from a mix-and-match approach have seduced many manufacturers and my list of the greatest mixed up love-children from the automotive world is as follows.

The AC Cobra is an obvious, but hard to ignore contender on such a list. Sometimes you're getting what you need from one aspect of a car, but are left disappointed in another area. For the AC Ace, the problem was essentially, Pretty But Slow - what you might unkindly call the Paris Hilton dilemma. Solving it created a brutal combination of enormous American V8 and slightly bewildered British sportscar. Inserting a 4.7 litre and then a 7.0 litre V8 into a car the size of the Ace was rather like building a hydro-electric power station inside a crofter's cottage. Some will point out that the Cobra wasn't a particularly great handling car but anyone who's seen a picture of Dan Gurney bullying one around the Targa Florio or stood next to one at idle will find such criticism hard to hold on to.

Others had a more ambitious vision, deciding that merely combining the DNA from two countries wouldn't be quite enough to get the job done. The Menage a Trois approach was vindicated by the Gordon Keeble GK1, the result of the English persuading the Americans and Italians to take a room together, before turning out the lights and jumping in too. Remarkably, despite the room in question being on an industrial estate in Slough, the super coupe that was produced was rather wonderful. Just under 5 and a half litres of Chevy V8, sitting in a very pretty Bertone styled body meant that you and 3 friends could hit 60 in 7.5 seconds and go onto 140 mph. Not bad for 1963. Sadly, as well as providing the vision and the understatement (in the form of the tortoise bonnet badge) the Brits also supplied the manufacturing crisis that helped to kill the GK1 with less than 100 made.

Good though they were, the use of American V8s was sometimes motivated by economic considerations as much as design purity. They provided an inexpensive route to off-the-shelf power. Gordon Murray though did not adopt a "that'll do" approach to building the world's fastest and most expensive production car. He wanted 550 hp or so for his McLaren F1. With BMW's custom 6.1 litre V12 he found 627 of them and an engine that would spit 3 foot-long flames from the back of the car. You couldn't show off about switching to battery power in the McLaren but you could stick a long tail on the back and take it to Le Mans. The F1 represented barely contained motorsport-derived fury, combined with bespoke luggage and as such stands as a high water mark of hybrid lunacy.

In the corporate world, few phrases highlight the wonder of the hybrid world quite so well as "Lamborghini V10-powered, German executive saloon." Presumably someone at Ingolstadt went out for Friday drinks one week, had rather too many Jagermeisters, fell asleep in his clothes and had a dream involving Chancellor Helmut Kohl singing Nessun Dorma. Whatever the inspiration, the Audi S8 took a concept that was rather poorly attempted by the Lancia Thema 8.32 and made it actually work.

And then there’s Morgan. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Malvern went mildly and politely bonkers with the Aero 8. As if a bonded-aluminium, laser cut chassis wasn’t revolutionary enough, the retro-anachronism suddenly had a BMW V8. A great engine, marking time in the boring looking M3 met with the wild looking Morgan, was allowed to make quite a bit more noise, wear odd clothes and suddenly everything made sense. At least it did once the AeroMax changed the front end from boss-eyed to Hugo Boss.

Yes the Prius allows its owners a moment of new-technology smugness. But by bringing together two unremarkable engines in an unremarkable body it consigns itself to mediocrity. It’s cars like the Morgan and the Cobra, combining pieces of disparate, sometimes fractured, brilliance that represent the Evo-Hybrid - a car that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Reviews - Lotus Evora

No manufacturer has a model range like Lotus. Ferrari and Lamborghini supply haute-couture with cars that are faster but less agile. Pagani and Bugatti, in their pursuit of shock and awe, make cars that are both more powerful and more intimidating. Porsche has an SUV on its books.

Lotus does pure, undiluted driving pleasure. Does that come with concessions?Absolutely. There are no cup-holders in a Lotus Evora, There are no heated seats in a Lotus Exige. And there are no memory seats in a Lotus Elise. None are needed.

If the Elise was the original cocky teenager that set modern Lotus on the road to driving-zen, the Exige represented the wild-child 20-something who got experimental haircuts and a tattoo. Now we have the Evora, the 30-something who got a gym-membership, a black turtle-neck and their own office. It’s the same person, just in different guises and I’ve been given a day with a brand new test car and some mountain roads to see just how the little car from Norfolk grew up.

The location of those mountain roads is America’s Pacific North-West. An invitation from Butch Bockmier, one of the owners of Lotus’s Seattle dealership, to try the new Evora in new territory proves impossible to resist. Before diving into the car I start with a quick drive in a 2007 Exige S to get reacquainted with the Lotus brand of petrol-headonism and to provide a benchmark.

You don’t get cockpit tinsel in an Exige. You get three small knurled dials for the heating and ventilation, the occasional LED-topped pimple controlling headlights and electric windows and a stereo. You adjust the wing-mirrors by sticking your hand out of the window. None of this matters of course because above 5000 rpm the Exige experiences a small psychotic episode. Give the accelerator a hefty shove in second and the sound from behind you changes from hornet to screaming buzz-saw. As the rev counter touches 6000, the addictive shove of G-force strengthens. As it touches 7500 there’s a lunatic whistle from the supercharger and a small red light illuminates in your peripheral vision to tell you that the Exige is ready to do it all over again in 3rd. This is 220 forced induction horsepower in 915 kilos. It’s the wonderful, violent, deftly balanced little car that I remember. Time to switch to the Evora.

Within 5 minutes of the start of my drive I’m sitting in the rain at a freeway on-ramp watching a blue on white 2009 Mustang GT next to me light up its tyres. Watching big V8 muscle break traction and then fishtail down through the spray on to the road below is always good entertainment. It also provides a demonstration of an alternate route to 200 bhp/ton. The 1.5 ton Ford uses a 4.6 litre, 300 hp V8, the 1.3 ton Lotus a 3.5 litre 276 hp ‘six. The Mustang has the edge on noise, but I’m headed to Lotus territory.

My destination is the Summit at Snoqualmie about 40 miles east of Seattle. It’s a ski resort in winter but I’ve received a tip that the area offers the right setting for exercising a Lotus and a quick check on Google Earth shows a promisingly twisty route just off the interstate. There’s short freeway schlep to get there so, sat in the Evora at 60 mph in the rain, there’s time to take stock.

Now, a Lotus Exige is no more designed as a motorway commuter than an F-15 Strike Eagle is designed to take you and your family on holiday to Torremolinos. The Evora however is different. In sixth gear, there’s a muted drone from the engine at the 70 mph legal limit. Conversation doesn’t require raised voices and road surface imperfections are confidently absorbed. The Toyota engine provides useful torque when needed. It won’t snap your head back in the higher gears but overtaking is easy and drama free.

From the driver’s seat the Evora dials back the highly-strung energy of the Exige and there’s even a nod towards gadgetry. To the right of the dials is a neat red digital schematic of the car showing tyre pressures and vital fluid temperatures. To the left a graphic shows the fuel tank level. Compared with the Exige’s cockpit, the slice of leather running across the dash, colour-matched to the seats, is almost decadent. It’s red leather in the car I’m driving, lending the impression that the instruments are set into a red-lipped mouth ahead of the driver. If it’s what you want, the Evora can be as demanding as watching Monarch of the Glen with a mug of warm milk.

And yet...as you drive, the Lotus begins a stealthy campaign to corrupt your calmer driving instincts. The steering wheel is small and always communicating. The Evora isn’t nervous, it’s just acutely transparent. The wheel occasionally writhes gently in your hands as the car explores a camber change before returning obediently to its original path. The gearlever sprouts from a central island and presents an aluminium sphere a perfect hand-drop away from the steering wheel. In fact, the positioning in 4th and 6th is so good that you feel the Evora constantly goading you to let your palm fall the bare inches to the right and find the lower gears.

40 miles of temptation later my exit appears, I pull off the freeway and stop. The narrow road ahead is deserted. It snakes downhill from where I sit, bounded by huge boulders and, after a couple of hairpins, disappears from sight into a pine forest complete with tourist-brochure ribbons of mist.

Time to learn more. Compared with the Exige the gear change has a longer throw and a more metallic feel. There's a reassuring weigh to the controls, heavier than the smaller car’s, though not actually heavy. This, together with the slightly larger dimensions mean that it’s initially not quite as easily placed as the Exige. But to hold the the steering wheel is to mainline uncut information from the road beneath the wheels. The road’s damp with mist and the camber changes constantly but the Evora’s ability to deploy most of its power without getting twitchy means that confidence grows fast. After three or four miles of an increasingly wide grin I turn around and make a return pass.

Pushing harder on the run up the hill, it’s true that a little of the explosive acceleration of the Exige has been sacrificed. The Evora nonetheless should manage 0-60 in 4.9 seconds and go on to 160 mph and it does so making a more cultured sound. There’s more bass than the 1.8 'four can manage so the Evora growls where the the Exige wails. The supercharger whine has gone, instead the Evora provides the occasional, well mannered pop on the overrun. Close to the top of the road again and around a corner the shrapnel of a small rock-fall covers my half of the road. An abrupt swerve troubles the Lotus not at all, it darts around the debris with insouciance.

Parked for a moment next to a resting lime green snow plough, a man with a parka and black labrador delays getting into his truck to shout, “What's that car? Is it a Lotus?"

“Evora”, I reply. He gives up on the truck and comes over. "How much is it?" "Around 86 thousand dollars". He whistles. "Man I'd love to have one of these. Guess I'll have to keep fixing the ski-lifts a little longer."

It’s certainly a handsome car. Ultimately for me the styling loses a little of the delicacy of the smaller cars. Hard to avoid perhaps, but there's a slight heaviness about the rear haunches that introduces a hint of awkwardness for me. That said, it stands up well against the 911 in my opinion. In the dark metallic grey of this car, the Evora has a well calculated predatory air about it.

As I head back into Seattle, kids, imprisoned in the third row of people carriers, do literal double-takes and proceed to ignore Spongebob Squarepants on their TV screens as the Evora appears next to them. Their parents up front nudge each other and point.

Lotuses all share a certain otherworldliness on the road, heightened in the land of the pick-up and SUV. There's a sense that a Lotus on the freeway, like roller-skating at a funeral, is technically possible but somehow, shocking. It's not that the cars are ill at ease in that setting, just that alongside giant Ford F350s, Grand Cherokees and Crown Victorias, their looks suggest you recently arrived from a parallel dimension.

This sense of drama is likely to be a little reduced in the UK, where a Lotus is a more familiar sight. But in any market, behind the wheel, it’s easy to be seduced by the Evora. The bonnet drops out of sight, leaving the road apparently disappearing a foot ahead of your toes. On either side the wings slope down towards the centre-line and a single wiper sweeps across the screen. At traffic lights the heat wash from the front radiators makes the view ahead dance gently. As with the smaller cars, there’s a hint of the Le Mans Prototype here.

It’s a confident car the Evora, unafraid to retain the DNA of the Elise and Exige as it moves up a weight division. That it manages the transition successfully is undoubted and welcome, the 911 has too long been untroubled in its niche. Its price and perhaps the perceived lack of glamour in its Toyota-sourced engine will give some pause for thought. But for those who care about the sum of the complete package, the balance of power, feel and response, the Evora represents a company at the top of its game.