The Wasp and the Bee. Two small creatures, the existence of which causes me great confusion – I mean, they’re pretty much the same animal aren’t they? Both are yellow and black, both fly and importantly, both are much more powerful than their size would suggest: you could crush either one with your hand, but they wouldn’t half make you pay for it as they went down. Let’s face it, no one can look proud in victory when they’re teary-eyed, squealing and clutching a barely visible wound. However, despite the similarities, they’re actually very different beasts, with very different purposes: Bees make honey; no one knows what Wasps do.
Wasps are aggressive, they flick from left to right with a machine-like precision - purposeful in their lack of purpose, then strike when you leave your guard down with an ill-timed swipe – they are malignant and go out looking for a fight. Bumble bees are much more benign, they’re happy to cruise about the place looking for flowers, they’re fluffy and they’ll only hurt you if you really provoke them. In a children’s story, the Bee would be Moog, the Wasp would be Evil Edna.
A bit like the Exige S and the Europa S. On the face of it, it’s hard to see the point of having both in the line-up. They’re very similar in size and outright performance, and there is an undeniably strong family resemblance, but look a bit harder and the differences soon become blindingly obvious. The Exige is the Wasp – all pent-up aggression and no practical purpose, it just likes to go out to see what it can take down in a good old-fashioned dirty street fight. It can’t make honey; it just eats spiders, stings your dog and scares your girlfriend. But it has a lot of fun doing it. The Europa is the Bee, it’s a bit softer, a bit fluffier and a bit friendlier – it makes your girlfriend say “Aaaah”, rather than “Argh!”; pollinates your flowers and will only sting your dog if he tries to eat it. The Bee works for its living.
Making this distinction is important before you drive the Europa anywhere; if you go into a drive in this thinking it’s going to be like a big Exige you’ll be disappointed. If you go into it thinking it’s going to be a big softy just because it’s a bit bigger and has carpets, you’ll be very surprised. The guys at Hethel have done a very good job of removing the hardest of the hardcore bits of the Exige, without losing any of that crucial Lotus ‘feel’. The steering is just as you would expect: awesome, it feels light, agile, fast; it has an impressive ride and exceptional body control. It’s still stiff, but it doesn’t crash over big pockmarks in the road.
It feels more exploitable than the Exige too, with lower limits it doesn’t snap into oversteer and, despite still feeling mid-engined in its balance, it doesn’t seem to have the inertia you would normally associate with a car like this once the limits of grip have been breached. Information about the road surface and how much grip the front tyres have flows through the thick-rimmed Momo steering wheel and it seems that no matter how quickly you’re going, the car always gives you tonnes of time to react to any situation you’ve managed to get yourself into. Traditionally, the best way to drive a Lotus quickly is to be swift but very smooth, and if you get truly ragged you’re punished by slower lap times and embarrassing understeer. But the Europa seems happy to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and thrown about and offers just as much satisfaction over its limits as it does below. The only criticism I have about the controls is a slightly dead middle pedal.
It is undoubtedly a much more relaxing drive than its little brother, both in terms of the way it handles, the way it rides and the mind set it encourages.
A lot of this is down to the 2.0 litre turbocharged Vauxhall lump being a much less frantic motor than the 1.8
Yes, ‘Business Class by Lotus’ has a lack of range rivalled only by Ford’s GT. But, what is truly irritating is that the Europa – which will get you from rest to 60 in less than five seconds and across a country lane faster than things costing twice as much – returns a truly respectable 25mpg, yet will only get you 160 miles between stops. For what is supposed to be a Grand Tourer this range just isn’t good enough and, for someone who hates filling up with petrol as much as I do, would get extremely annoying.
Another thing that would quickly become an irritation is the car’s inability to keep the outside, out. In the Exige, a bit of a leaky window and a healthy slug of wind noise are just about acceptable. As I said in my review of the ‘S’, “this isn’t a BMW 3-Series – road-holding, handling, performance and exhilaration are the far more important factors in a car like this”. Unfortunately, the Europa is a car that will go head-to-head with the Porsche Cayman and Nissan 350Z, so build quality cannot come second to performance in the R&D process. When water started streaming in through the firmly closed window on my way into work one morning, I was less than impressed. You just can’t get away with build quality issues like this on a car costing more than £30,000 aimed at a market populated by people who want to use their cars to get around every day; as a mode of transport as well as – if not in preference to - a source of fun. It is also far too noisy: the engine is an acceptable volume, but wind noise at motorway cruising speed makes the stereo all-but useless.
Because of this, I’m finding it very difficult to come to a definitive conclusion about Lotus’ latest motor car. If I wanted a sports car that I could use every day Porsche, BMW and Nissan wouldn’t even get a sniff of my £35k – I would be straight down to the Lotus dealer and ordering a Europa. But I’m 25, my back is in fine fettle, I don’t wear a suit to work and I don’t have ‘business clients’ who like to stay dry. The problem is that if someone asked me which sports car they should buy, I would point them towards a Cayman, a Z4 or a 350Z. I simply couldn’t bring myself to recommend a noisy car that leaks to someone who just wouldn’t get the satisfaction from having a truly involving vehicle that you need to get in order to offset being deafened and dribbled on.
In short, there’s no doubt that the Europa is a great car – unfortunately it is also a poor product.
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