The last new Lotus Elise
A chance to drive the last ever Lotus Elise? Wild weather couldn’t hold us back
It’s miraculous: all the road feel you could ever ask for, but with the unpleasant jolts dialled out
This car is all about the way it moves down a bumpy, twisty B-road. Always has been. It’s hard to describe, but I’m going to try.
For example, you can steer it with just a finger and thumb. Think about that. The steering is unassisted – it’s not like some ’70s Yank tank with ‘EZ-Turn’ power steering. Instead, the force through the rack clearly communicates a delicate contact patch under the front tyres. Now grip the shapely steering wheel with both hands, feel the way the alcantara rim is ergonomically moulded to fit you. The wheel jiggles and wriggles in your hands, but potholes and camber changes don’t jar or bounce you off line. It’s miraculous: all the road feel you could ever ask for, but with the unpleasant jolts dialled out.
And the ride. You can absolutely attack a B-road because of the way the car dances over the surface. While heavier (scarier) supercars bite big chunks out of the tarmac as they chomp down the road, the Elise nibbles at the surface, like a mouse. No wait, it’s not a mouse, it’s a cat. While other cars thunder along like a galloping horse, making the ground shake, the Elise is light and dainty on its paws as it scampers away.
The Lotus Elise has been doing this for 25 years. Yes, it’s grown up a bit since it was launched in 1996 – put on a bit of weight – but the ingredients, the magic, are essentially the same. Now Lotus has announced Elise production will end this anniversary year, to make way for the new Type 131. A new dawn for Lotus, but my god, the automotive world will be a poorer place without this car.
So, part celebration, part requiem, part never-skip-a-chanceto-drive-an-Elise-if-you’re-offered-one, we travel to Norfolk to have a final blast in the Final Edition.
Yes Norfolk. Weird. Back in the mid-’60s, Lotus founder Colin Chapman was running out of room at his factory in Cheshunt, just north of London. Given that most of Britain’s post-war racing took place on former RAF bases, Chapman knew all about disused airfields. So the story goes he got a map and drew a 100-mile circle around London. Right on the edge of his radius he found RAF Hethel, a US bomber base during the war. Chapman, who loved light aircraft, flew himself up there in his Piper Comanche, and landed on the old runway. It was perfect, and in 1966 Hethel became home to the Lotus factory, the F1 team and a new test track, laid out around an elbow between two landing strips.
Today, Lotus has grown to be a tight collection of factory sheds and offices, but it’s still a strange place to find such a big brand. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and you’re sure you’re about to find a local garden centre rather than a car factory when you turn down Potash Lane.
After a Covid-compliant handover at the gate, the Elise is mine. At first sight, the Sport 240 Final Edition is familiar to anyone who knows the Series 3 Elise (the 2010 facelift of the S2). The neatly curvaceous body remains unchanged, with the single-piece headlamps and a Toyota engine hiding under a mesh behind the cabin. There are some tweaks to make the Final Edition more special: as the name suggests, the engine puts out 240bhp, up 23bhp from the standard Sport 220, thanks to a revised ECU. It also sits on 10-spoke forged alloys that are 0.5kg lighter than the wheels on the 220.
Inside, the biggest changes are a new digital instrument cluster, giving the driver’s POV a much more contemporary ⊲
look; and that steering wheel I mentioned – it too is new, with a flat bottom to help you get in and out. There are also a few new colours and trims, and a Final Edition plaque.
It’s a personal pleasure to me that this press car is finished in Azure Blue – a deliberate throwback to one of the original launch colours from 1996. I was a junior road tester back then, and in the September 1996 edition of Performance Car magazine I did a comparison between a brand new (Azure Blue) Elise and a 30-year-old Elan Sprint, owned by a local farmer called Harry Metcalfe. Wonder what happened to him?
Full of memories of that S1, the thing that hits me as I climb in is how much more comfortable this final Elise is than the first. Back then, the famous, bonded-aluminium tub was almost completely bare, the windows had manual winders and the only heating vents pointed up at the windscreen. I loved the pared-back minimalism of it, but it offered all the comfort of an empty biscuit tin, especially on a wet winter day.
Now, the 2021 Elise cabin is a little cocoon of alcantara, and the cold, unyielding alloy has all but disappeared beneath doorto-door carpets and plastics. Yes, the original Elise weighed just 730kg (Lotus claimed an optimistic 675kg), and the new one is almost 200kg more (at 922kg), but this is now a lovely, welcoming cabin to climb into. The seats are firm but supportive around your back and hips (less so around your shoulders); the fabrics feel substantial; the stitching around the vents is nicely finished; and it feels altogether cohesive, characterful and snug. Best of all, the driving position is pure ’60s sports-racer: you sit laid-back low, but the steering wheel and dashboard are lower still, seemingly down at belly-button height, giving you a clear view through that deeply curved windscreen and past the bulging front arches.
We head north to reach the Norfolk coast. Within a few miles, all the delights of the Elise come flooding back: that poise, the way it changes direction, even through a roundabout on the Norwich bypass. A car to enjoy anywhere. And while it might be heavier than the original, this 240bhp Final Edition is also a lot faster – more than a second quicker to 62mph than the 118bhp S1 Elise at 4.5 seconds.
So the Final Edition is quick; yet it’s still true, 25 years on, that the engine is not the focus of this car. The 1.8 supercharged four-cylinder revs willingly, but the sound is hardly a raucous bark, and the supercharger plays a subtle role. You can feel it boost the acceleration – hardly gut-wrenching at lower revs, livelier from 4000rpm, like a Mario Kart that’s just eaten a mushroom above 5000rpm. But there’s no rising supercharger whine, no aural drama like a Ferrari or a flat-six Porsche. Instead, the engine is just a means to an end – to push you along, so you can savour that wonderful ride and handling.
We reach Cromer, a Victorian seaside town, out-of-season and pandemic-hit with empty streets, closed pier and desolate promenade. Thankfully we find the Old Rock Shop Bistro for take-away coffee and sausage rolls. Amazingly, as we eat, the drizzle dribbles away and the sun comes out. As any Elise owner will tell you, anything short of a flash-flood monsoon means the roof has to come off. Back in the early Elise days this was a total pantomime, needing 57 procedures and an Allen key; thankfully the big brains at Lotus managed to engineer something much simpler, and the modern roof takes about 60 seconds to unclip and roll up.
Now, as we head further along the coast, engine sounds are all but lost beneath the wind noise, but I’ll trade that any day for the extra exhilaration.
We turn inland towards Burnham Market to find empty roads – bumpy, single-track East Anglian roads, where the Lotus Elise was born, and where the Sport 240 feels most sublime. Alongside the 240, Lotus has also released a Cup 250 Final Edition, stiffened for track use; but I’ve always felt the ‘touring’ Elise is the original and best. Supple and communicative, every sensation of an uneven road is telegraphed straight through to your body, every movement of hands and feet gets an immediate response. The Elise isn’t a tail-sliding showboater: without loads of surplus power or a limited-slip diff, the tail will twitch if you provoke it, but it’s not like a Toyota GT86, wet-road drifting through corners. It has traction control, and a halfway-house Sport mode proves to be a good compromise, allowing a little more slip and movement without spinning away power. It’s much more fun to drive within the limits, sensing the subtle shifts in yaw angle as you get on and off the throttle. ⊲
The original offered the comfort of a biscuit tin. Now it’s a cocoon of alcantara
After 25 years of refinement, the Elise still feels urgent and raw, but today it’s a car you can use every day
Thankfully, between all the direction changes, the gearchange is now a pleasure too, rather than a distraction. The old S1 gearbox was borrowed from the MG F, and I remember it was frustratingly vague. Since the switch to Toyota engines back in 2004, the matching Toyota gearbox has been much more precise – much more in keeping with the car. And since 2017, the linkage has been exposed too, saving weight and getting car geeks like me all excited. Altogether it’s a neat, sharp, fast gearchange, one that encourages you to shift down occasionally just for the sake of it.
After battling through snow left behind by the Beast from the East, we meander our way back towards the coast and Hunstanton, another out-of-season and pandemic-hit seaside town, this time without even a pier. But we do find chips.
After watching a winter sun set out over The Wash, darkness begins to fall and it’s time to head home along a long, looping route back to Hethel. I don’t mind. As I fold the roof back on, I’m itching with excitement at the prospect of driving back across East Anglia. After 25 years of refinement the Elise still feels urgent and raw, but today it is a car you can take on a long journey, even use every day if you made a few concessions to wind noise, engine noise and cabin space. Small, light and pretty economical at around 35mpg, it remains a modern sports-car option – it’s not like compromising to drive a classic car. I dread to think what a 1996 MG F feels like these days.
That’s the most amazing thing of all: the Elise simply hasn’t aged. The car’s extruded aluminium technology was way ahead of its time back in 1996, and it remains contemporary and relevant today. Cars tend to age because their cabin tech goes out of date or their controls feel sluggish and heavy without modern ECUs and servos. The natural, unvarnished simplicity of the Elise has kept it fresh and its lightness is a timeless virtue.
I recommend you go and buy an Elise Final Edition today. This little car is a giant in our shared car culture, and this one is not only the last, it’s arguably the best, and I promise you’ll fall head over heels in love with it.