There are no shortage of compellingly chancy Loti in the Classifieds, but the Evora is about as low risk as Lotus ownership gets. Which is why this week's Brave Pill shouldn't be seen as a celebration of outright peril - hard for something with a famously unexplodable Toyota engine - rather a salute that something so fast and exotic has gotten so affordable.
The seller of our car reckons it is the first Evora to be offered for below £20,000 - an assertion that Enzo the hamster hasn't been able to contradict after a thorough trawl of the interwebs. It's a monetary barrier that it is breaching just three years after the earliest cars dropped under £30K, and although the very attractive price is due in large part to a six-figure odometer reading, it's hard to look at this car without seeing a proper bargain.
While the Evora has never been short on fans, it has often struggled to spread its appeal beyond the Norfolksi who bleed green and yellow - there remains no tougher question in the senior sportscar market than "why didn't you buy a Porsche?" When the Evora was launched Lotus predicted it would be building up to 2000 cars a year. That proved seriously optimistic: 2010 was the only year when production got into four figures, peaking at 1170. By the middle of the decade totals had fallen into the low hundreds.
Not that the Evora could be blamed for this, its fate being intertwined with the soap opera of Lotus's changing management and the company's schizophrenic model plan. But it's worth remembering how well everything started, with the Evora's debut at the 2008 British Motor Show winning a reaction warmer than any since the launch of the original Elise.
Lotus had also learned lessons from its previous attempt to build a Grand Tourer. The Europa S was a stop gap, but it was also a critical stinker, with its use of the dinky Elise chassis and utility-grade GM 2.0-litre turbo from the VX220 making too cramped and too crude for its chosen mission. It proved that if Lotus did want to enter this tough part of the market, it would need to do things properly.
Which is why Lotus bit several very expensive bullets to create the Evora. The most obvious of these was a new platform, one large enough to allow for a GT-spacious cabin and the enhanced practicality of 2+2 seating; never the easiest thing with a mid-mounted engine. The powerplant was the other innovation, a 3.5-litre Toyota V6 that would give obvious distinction over the then exclusively four-cylindered Elise and Exige.
There was some critical sneering when pundits realised the new motor was closely related to the one in the Toyota Camry, although with Lotus-specific tune that turned it up to a healthy 280hp. But once reviewers actually got to experience the motor's combination of urge and snappy response such sniping pretty much died out, the biggest criticism of the V6 being the subdued soundtrack of the standard exhaust.
The engine was decent, but the Evora's chassis was exceptional. My first experience of it was on some of Wales's more demanding A-roads in company with the 997 Porsche Carrera 2 I had driven to the rendezvous. Over yumpy, cresty tarmac the Evora's exceptional body control felt closer to magic than conventional chassis engineering, and made the 911 feel as if its dampers were filled with concrete. The Lotus's steering was another highlight, Lotus proving it could combine extraordinary feel and feedback with the power assistance it had eschewed in the Elise and Exige.
Okay, it wasn't perfect. Even in a freshly-fettled press car the quality of the manual gearshift action was less than great, and was getting noticeably baggier after a day of hard use. And although spacious the cabin felt considerably less plush than that of the 911, with hard-to-read buttons and some buzzy cruising harmonics. Nor could the Evora match the Porsche on power, being 70hp adrift, or sheer mechanical charisma - but it was also £17,000 cheaper with much better standard equipment.
Power parity with the Porsche came in 2011 with the arrival of the supercharged Evora S. But by that time Lotus had entered a strange, new era; one that soon distracted attention from what should have been the car's golden years. Former Ferrari marketing executive Dany Bahar became Lotus CEO in 2009 and quickly set about an ambitious engineering programme that was meant to lead to the creation of five new models and its own engine architecture and jump the brand substantially upmarket. It was a brave new future that left little obvious place for the Evora, with Bahar confirming to journalists it didn't feature in his medium-term plans for the brand. Hardly a ringing endorsement for the company's freshly launched flagship.
Of course, Bahar's grandiose schemes unraveled some way before any of the new cars made production, but the Evora never got close to the success of its early years again, especially as increasingly marginal increases in performance were used to justify spiraling prices. That's why there are always going to be many more early cars than late ones out there.
Our Pill is one of the first wave, a 2010 'Launch Edition', that came with the Sport, Tech and Premium packs as standard. It also wears the inoffensive combination of a dark grey exterior and brown trim, and - as a further bonus - is a manual rather than one of the dim-witted 'IPS' torque converter autos.
Despite having covered 101,000 miles, it still looks impressively fresh in most of the pictures, with only the vendor's commendably honest decision to include some close-ups of wear and tear indicating where the miles are showing. These include a worn driver's seat bolster, a slightly scuffed leather sill protector, stone chips and what seems to be slight delamination between different layers of the headlights. None of which is going to distract much from the core functionality of what will always be an impressively usable sportscar.
The car has a full service history that was main dealer up to 2015 and subsequently through a well-known specialist. The private seller says it has been run exclusively on Shell V-Power, has never been tracked and has had the sort of steady use that tends to keep cars in better fettle than miserly storage. It's certainly been enjoyed, the MOT history saying it had covered just 30,744 miles by 2015 and then racking up 15,000, 19,000, 18,000 and 16,000 in subsequent years. It failed its test in 2018 with worn rear tyres and advisories for tired rear brakes - both corrected when it passed three days later - with the most recent ticket warning of one of those "not excessive" oil leaks from the back of the engine.
It seems unlikely that Evora values will stop falling as cars drop below the £20K barrier; this does not represent depreciation-free motoring. But value loss is going to be on a very shallow curve and running costs should be unscary by Lotus standards. The brand new £85,900 Evora GT410 Sport you can still buy new is a very fine car, faster and more focused than our Pill. But is it really four and a half times better?
1 / 6