Lotus makes a line of lightweight cars with incredible handling, the kind of cars that, while road-legal, are most at home on the track. Although engineered to the nth degree, Lotus still found room for improvement on its latest Exige S240.
Wayne Cunningham
Wayne Cunningham reviews cars and writes about automotive technology for CNET's Roadshow. Prior to the automotive beat, he covered spyware, Web building technologies, and computer hardware. He began covering technology and the Web in 1994 as an editor of The Net magazine.
Lotus makes remarkable sports cars. Minimizing weight means this Exige S240 can get to 60 mph in 4.1 seconds using a supercharged 1.8-liter engine, and it still get 26 mpg on the highway. Beyond the engine specifications, handling in the corners is nothing less than phenomenal. For the 2010 model year, Lotus tweaks the body of the Exige S240 to get even better performance.
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Lotus restyled the front end of the Exige S240 primarily to improve the air vents. The main vent is larger, letting more air cool the radiator. Two additional vents in front of the wheels feed air through twin oil coolers. The mid-mounted engine is still the same Toyota-sourced 1.8-liter as in the previous model, with Lotus technology squeezing 240 horsepower out of it.
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The Exige S240 features adjustable traction and launch control. You can set the RPM level at which the car will launch, and the system will minimize wheel spin. The traction control can be turned off, or set to allow up to 7 percent wheel slip.
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Beyond the front styling, the other big change to the Exige S240 is the rear wing, more than 7 inches wider than on the previous model. It creates downforce of 93 pounds at 100 mph, enough to keep the 2,077 pounds of the car planted when inertial-forces try to pull it off a turn.
