From the December 2023 issue of Car and Driver.
Naming a road gives it something like a personality, or at least a sense of drama. North Carolina Highway 209, a.k.a. the Rattler, needs no help with either. Its two-lane pavement ripples north-south in the mountains near the Tennessee border, traversing just over 36 miles of forest in the process. When it’s not shimmying along cliff edges or rappelling into a tight ravine, 209 is shotgunning through narrow valleys dotted with churches and plots of corn. Some sections are so darkened by the tree canopy that shadows are rare on cloudless days; others offer breathtaking skyline views.
Not all of those miles are famous. The Rattler’s unofficial beginning sits roughly 12 miles north of 209’s southern terminus, at the intersection of North Carolina State Route 1334, next to an old gas station and general store. “Ride The Rattler,” the sign reads. “Starts Here! Next 24 Miles. 290 Curves.” The sign’s center holds a drawing of a snake and a grinning skull. At the bottom, in smaller type, are the words “Ferguson Supply”—the name of the store—and “Rattler Shirts Inside.”
Some people like their fun roads with drama, a story, and a T-shirt; others just want corners and straights and to get on with it. Because he likes all of the above but also stupid jokes, your narrator simply left that intersection at full rip while making a face like Graham Hill and dreaming up nerdy sports-car riffs on movie titles (Two-Lane T-Shirt, Apex through the Gift Shop, etc.).
Colin Chapman, the engineering genius and master pitchman who founded Lotus Cars, would probably have liked all of this. Dead since 1982, Chapman built his company on a mix of relentless innovation and staggering disdain for the status quo. Above all, he believed in the sales power of a good image, regardless of whether it aligned with reality.
Highway 209 Revisited
How North Carolina’s Rattler came to be.
In 1921, the North Carolina legislature backed a $50 million bond to commission a state-owned highway system. NC-209 was part of that project, appearing on maps as early as 1922. In the north, the road cuts through Pisgah National Forest, which covers 12 counties and more than 500,000 acres. Off the approximately 36-mile Rattler is Fines Creek. Legend holds that the town earned its name in the late 1700s after locals killed a man with the last name Fine in cold weather and placed his body under the ice of the nearest frozen river.
The Rattler doesn’t much remind you of death or a snake, and you can’t see that sign without wondering which came first, the road-name chicken or the T-shirt-shop egg. But if you are staring down the barrel of some 300 corners at the wheel of a mid-engine English bolide, it feels like you have arrived somewhere worth going, so you leave that intersection by whacking the throttle into next week.
Lotus won’t admit this directly, but the Emira is almost certainly a stopgap—the first new sports-car model developed in the wake of the brand’s 2017 acquisition by Chinese carmaker Geely, which also owns Volvo. Geely has been pumping money into Lotus for years, investing in this car, yes, but also in everything from a new automated factory to an upcoming line of mass-market EVs.
Transliterated from Arabic, Emira means “princess.” Fittingly, the Lotus’s hardware is a kind of royalty—old of blood and long feted, if a bit shallow in gene pool. The Emira was launched in Europe for 2023 as a replacement for the aging Lotus Evora, a 2+2 sports car first sold in America for 2010. The former’s bonded-aluminum spaceframe is an update of the latter’s, which makes it a kissing cousin to the chassis used in Lotus’s smaller Elise, a model sold on our shores from 2005 to 2011 and with a platform rooted in the 1990s.
The body is a raft of influences—some McLaren here, a dash of Ferrari there, doses of seashell, lady hip, eel, manta ray, clam, Volvo. No reasonable person who has been under an Evora will stick their head into an Emira’s wheel well and think the two cars are anything but siblings. The Toyota-sourced 400-hp 3.5-liter V-6 and the Aisin six-speed manual transaxle are essentially Evora carryover pieces. (A 360-hp turbo four paired with an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic, both sourced from Mercedes-Benz, will be available soon.)
The Evora’s interior was nice but amateurish by comparison. The Emira shares the same wheelbase as its predecessor and is slightly longer overall, 167 pounds heavier, and more than an inch and a half wider, but not so you’d notice. The sills are low, and the cockpit is both roomier and easier to fall into. The Evora’s two tiny rear seats are gone, replaced by a small storage shelf, which is cool because your narrator once tried to fold himself into the back of an Evora for a short ride to lunch and succeeded only in giving himself screaming back pain for weeks.
Lotus hopes to sell 4500 of these princesses a year. The example we took to North Carolina, a First Edition model, featured a host of options mandatory with the package, from an active exhaust to heated seats and rain-sensing wipers. In traffic, the Emira feels like a “real” car in a way that Lotuses traditionally have not, which is to say, it had a factory-installed stereo that wasn’t also listed in the Crutchfield catalog, and its interior didn’t seem built by elves who live in a tree and earn their primary income by baking cookies.
That sign at Ferguson Supply is roughly 40 minutes south of the Rattler’s end, an intersection in the mountain hamlet of Hot Springs, North Carolina. In between is a Lotus road, if ever there was one, a fast waltz in asphalt. There are open miles and dense ones, faster sections where you can breathe, and switchbacks packed almost on top of each other, rising and falling in rapid succession. Most of all, there is a constant and gradual climb up and up into the mountains before that last final drop descending through tunnels of trees and into the winding road through the valley that is home to Hot Springs.
What is that run like in a Chinese-backed Lotus sports car in 2023? Same as it ever was, to borrow from the Talking Heads: a bubbly little feedback cocktail for spine and fingers, and a smidge of squat as the rear suspension compresses. The hydraulically assisted steering, a wonderful throwback, lightens ever so slightly as the load transfers aft. Turn-in is shockingly quick and can take some getting used to. The nose simply snaps to attention whenever you ask, batting into a set quick as thought.
Subtle reminders of road camber and available grip come through the seatback, wheel, inner ear. You drive over an acorn and feel an instant of steering fidget as the tire cracks the nut in half. The Emira’s long-travel suspension is dialed as Lotus suspensions always have been, with dampers that somehow combine sharp response with piston strokes that seem to finish in a pile of velvet.
A dust of trailed brake can be useful to keep the front tires settled and pointed. A shrieky little supercharger whoop hoses out of the intake just aft of the driver’s door. Low-end torque is present but not excessive, the engine’s cams biased toward midrange and top end. The shifter is a fussy and balky old thing, long in throw and clunky in synchro, but it can be satisfying and quick if you know what it wants. (Move the knob like an egg, gentle but rapid flicks of the wrist, and it falls into gear. Pedal timing is critical.)
That shifter is inexcusable, but it’s also a tell for the rest of the package: Unlike most modern cars, the Emira wants to be driven in just one way. It pulls pace from fingers instead of palms and forces your inputs to be delicate. It is a Lotus as we have long known them, in other words, only minus the cottage-company interior. The switchgear doesn’t look sourced from a truck stop. You no longer have to fold your spine in half to climb behind the wheel.
Geely investment or no, some details remain vintage Lotus. The dinky trunk behind the engine gets hot enough to melt stuff in your luggage. The brakes can be annoyingly grabby. Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are standard, but the touch controls on the steering-wheel spokes occasionally don’t work. A few panel gaps on our test car looked fine from five feet away but were uneven up close. The throttle calibration gave a huge wallop of driveline lash on initial travel.
More vintage Lotus: Halfway through my first run up 209, enthralled by the Emira’s steering, I forgot about all the niggles and returned to indulging myself, which is to say, I started thinking up stupid variations on classic movie lines through an English-car lens. (“Forget it, Jake. It’s Lotustown.”)
Chapman founded Lotus in 1948. By the time he died, he had grown the company from shedlike origins to a world-renowned engineering specialist with a stack of Formula 1 championships. His road cars featured an obsessive focus on low mass and often bleeding-edge technology. Every new idea existed simply as a bridge to the next.
If this all sounds a tad melancholy, maybe that’s why. For all the Emira does well, it is inarguably a decade-old platform with rough spots sanded smooth. Whether that’s exciting or dull has a lot to do with how you view the current automotive moment.
We don’t come to bury Caesar. The Emira is a great sports car, even a great Lotus, but the world’s other carmakers haven’t spent the past decade idle. A Mazda Miata is more playful and chipper in a corner. A Porsche 718 Cayman GTS 4.0 is cheaper, just as sharp when pressed, more fluid and refined, even—gasp—lighter. A Honda Civic Type R can occasionally feel Chapmanian in a corner. The list goes on.
One of Car and Driver‘s road warriors, the inimitable Jacob Kurowicki, 28, came along on this test to help. The Emira was the first Lotus that Kurowicki had driven. (Your narrator, a longtime nerd for the marque, will here resist the urge to state his dorky bona fides. Suffice it to say that I once owned a Lotus that lightly caught fire, and I loved the car anyway.)
Kurowicki was understandably a bit puzzled. “Why would you buy this over a Cayman?” he asked.
“It’s funny,” I said, sighing. “Lotuses used to be so far ahead of the pack in the intangibles that the question never came up. It was so much more than just neat steering feel. When the Elise was new, you could picture a certain kind of die-hard doing anything to have one. They’d be so smitten they’d overlook the kit-car interior, the iffy details and uneven paint, the contortions to get in or out—all the stuff the Emira just . . . solves.”
Naturally, the next morning, as we packed up to leave Hot Springs, the Emira’s V-6 struggled to start, then idled rough as it warmed up. Then I noticed uneven orange peel and what looked like a dry spot in the paint beneath the Emira’s windshield.
If English carmakers have taught us anything over the years, it’s that marketing is tied less to what you’re selling and more to how you sell it. The real question isn’t whether the world is still buying the focus that Lotus once sold, both literally and figuratively. It’s whether the marque can take the next step—whether Geely cash can make those coming EVs both modern cars and Chapman heirs at once. Whatever that means.
In sports cars, as in roads, names count for a lot. The Emira is an old-school Lotus, so we’re fans. We own the T-shirt. As for the future? Starts here, as the sign says. Fingers crossed.
Counterpoints
I give Lotus lots of credit for building a Lotus and not trying to chase the feel of another brand. The Emira driving experience is unique. The steering is alive, like a hyperactive terrier. Some of the playfulness is good, but then there are times you just wish it would calm down already. I could even get used to the shifter, which has the weight of an industrial breaker. Then again, I have a Cummins diesel–powered Dodge Ram 3500 with a manual. Regardless, the Emira keeps the Lotus spirit alive, and, like the printed word, that’s something worth clinging to. —K.C. Colwell
If a Porsche 718 Cayman is a sports car, the Emira tries for a baby-supercar vibe with its cab-forward design, ultralow cowl, and driver’s view framed by swollen front fenders. There’s major engine presence—it’s even visible in the rearview mirror. And dig the exposed shift linkage. Shift action, though, is trucklike, the steering isn’t as fluid as a Cayman’s, and even grazing the brake pedal will send your passenger lurching into the seatbelt. Still, this Lotus is intriguing enough that its idiosyncrasies may be worth mastering. —Joe Lorio
Specifications
Specifications
2024 Lotus Emira First Edition
Vehicle Type: mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door coupe
PRICE
Base/As Tested: $107,500/$107,500
Options: none
ENGINE
Supercharged DOHC 24-valve V-6, aluminum block and heads, port injection
Displacement: 211 in3, 3456 cm3
Power: 400 hp @ 6800 rpm
Torque: 310 lb-ft @ 3500 rpm
TRANSMISSION
6-speed manual
CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: control arms/control arms
Brakes, F/R: 14.6-in vented, cross-drilled, grooved disc/13.8-in vented, cross-drilled, grooved disc
Tires: Goodyear Eagle F1 Supersport
F: 245/35ZR-20 95Y LTS
R: 295/30ZR-20 101Y LTS
DIMENSIONS
Wheelbase: 101.4 in
Length: 173.7 in
Width: 74.6 in
Height: 48.3 in
Passenger Volume: 49 ft3
Cargo Volume: 12 ft3
Curb Weight: 3279 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 4.3 sec
100 mph: 10.3 sec
1/4-Mile: 12.7 sec @ 111 mph
130 mph: 18.3 sec
150 mph: 28.3 sec
Results above omit 1-ft rollout of 0.2 sec.
Rolling Start, 5–60 mph: 4.7 sec
Top Gear, 30–50 mph: 8.1 sec
Top Gear, 50–70 mph: 6.8 sec
Top Speed (mfr’s claim): 180 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 149 ft
Braking, 100–0 mph: 293 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 1.00 g
C/D FUEL ECONOMY
Observed: 20 mpg
EPA FUEL ECONOMY
Combined/City/Highway: 20/17/26 mpg
C/D TESTING EXPLAINED
Freelance
Sam Smith is a freelance journalist and former executive editor at Road & Track. His writing has appeared in Esquire and the New York Times, and he once drove a Japanese Dajiban around a track at speed while being purposely deafened by a recording of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” He lives in Tennessee with his family, a small collection of misfit vehicles, and a spaniel who is scared of squirrels.