The Lotus Elise is a two-seater sports car for purists. It offers speed, noise and goose- pimpled thrills in a rigorously carpet-free environment. Outside it looks like a car in search of a starting grid. Inside it has all the luxury and refinement of the interior of a filing cabinet.
The steering wheel is so taut that you only have to think about going round a corner and the car twitches. It gets about as close to a racing car as a road car is allowed to. It doesn't actually come with a fire extinguisher bolted between the seats, but you could fit one in there and it would look just fine.
If you're interested in heated front headlamp-washers, electric windows and boot-mounted CD-changers, this may not be your next vehicle. If you're in terested in the way engines smell when under pressure on a hairpin bend (and this is a small but by no means negligible market), then welcome home. Lotus has restyled the Elise - which is the kind of news that leads petrol-heads nationwide into spasms of wincing and leg-crossing. That's not just a car that Lotus are tinkering with there; it's a way of life. You mess with an Elise, and people get upset in the way they do when telephone boxes change.
But there's no major damage done. Some of the soft, rounded aspects of the old model have been swapped for some sharp creases. The old body didn't exactly seem apologetic, but the new one is brash and outgoing, quite muscular at the back and a bit angry-looking. It is also, apparently, 10mm closer to the ground than the old Elise, which might seem negligible. But, given that in the old model you were already virtually flat on your back on the tarmac, the extra 10mm represents a considerable feat of engineering.
It also makes the car just that little bit more difficult to get into, which surely will go down as added value among the sports-car-owning hardcore. Unless a vehicle requires you to rupture at least one hamstring slotting yourself inside, it just isn't trying hard enough, and neither are you. Here, Lotus has come good: the new Elise is definitely a double- hamstring-twanger. And if the Elise is difficult to get into, it's nigh on impossible to get out of. Imagine trying to exit a deep sea diving outfit through the helmet. And with no hamstrings. Heaven knows how one would manage this while drunk. Even sober, the most sensible thing to do might be to take some tools and tunnel out at the back.
Up to now, the Lotus Elise has been out on its own, but these days it doesn't quite have the road to itself and, unusually, it's the company's own fault. When Lotus helped out Vauxhall in the creation of the Vauxhall VX220 (the surprising, angular roadster that Griff Rhys-Jones advertises in his underpants), it's clear they did more than simply pass on a couple of tips. From within, through half-closed eyes and while stationary, the two models could be mistaken for one another. True, the Vauxhall has an exciting, you-too-can-race-at-Le-Mans push-button starter on the dashboard, whereas the Lotus is boring old key-operated. But otherwise, the most noticeable difference is that where the Vauxhall's dashboard is plastic-clad, the dashboard on the Elise I drove was wrapped in black suede, for that authentic, scratch-n-sniff, 1970s student effect.
Inevitably, to elect to have an Elise in the British climate is to choose to be cold a lot of the time. Even with the roof on. But at least the fan keeps the windscreen clear. In the VX220, I spent a lot of time and energy swiping away at the glass with my forearm in a largely unsuccessful attempt to prevent it misting over completely every 10 seconds or so. The Elise has four slatted vents, like miniature Sydney Opera Houses, positioned neatly under the glass, with which you can wage effective war on the fug which predictably builds up when your nose is only three or so centimetres away from the windscreen and the temperature outside is close to freezing.
The disappointing thing about the VX220 is how inoffensive the engine sounds. By contrast, the engine in the Elise (a 1.8 litre K-series, as in the previous model, but retuned) throbs like a powerboat at a standstill and very rapidly reaches offensiveness under acceleration - which must be at least half the point of owning a car like this.
The two cars cost exactly the same, but one comes with a Lotus symbol on it and the other comes with a Vauxhall symbol - and, more than that, a Vauxhall nose, with its chrome V, as seen on Astras and Cavaliers. For some buyers, the choice will come down to which badge they prefer on their key-fob: the Lotus one, with its charismatic oily whiff of British motor sport history; or the Vauxhall one, with its charismatic oily whiff of sales rep. Which, on reflection, may prove to be no choice at all.
