2015 Lotus Evora 400 review

Easier to get in and out of, certainly. As well as the sill being lower and narrower, the Evora’s door cards are thinner too, so you’ve a lower, wider gap to slide into. The lower sills make the new seats - each 3kg lighter than before - feel higher even though they’re not. They sit in the same position as before, in fact, skewing your legs towards the centre of the car despite an apparent increase in foot room.

Ergonomically the Evora is improved, then, but still not perfect. The diddy wheel can be set high and close, though, with a pleasingly-topped gearlever sprouting from a narrow centre console that, likewise, feels sturdier and more nicely finished than before, if less solid than one comprising part of a steel monocoque.

You can now easily read the clear, white-on-black dials, though, while buttons have been moved from obscurity behind the steering wheel to somewhere more sensible and are considerably better finished. There’s some decent stitching around, too, and – praise be – a more adjustable new heating and ventilation system that isn’t irritatingly loud even on its lowest blower setting.

Still, enough familiarisation. Thumb the new starter button and – oh, hello – in comes a remarkably burbly exhaust, with switchable bypass valve. The Evora has never made an unpleasant noise, but the new exhaust, with the right button pushed, finally makes this car as raucous as it always should have been.

Throttle response is still keen and, thanks to forced induction by supercharger rather than turbocharger, there’s no lag. The Evora 400 likes revs, though. It spins to 7000rpm and does its best work beyond 4500rpm, despite peak torque of 302lb ft arriving 1000rpm earlier than that and hanging around until 6500rpm.

The 400bhp power peak is made right up by the redline, by which time the Evora’s engine is making a fair old howl and feeling every bit as quick as the 0-60mph time of 4.1sec would suggest. I guess you’d call that junior supercar pace these days. With a 186mph top speed this is the fastest production Lotus ever made, and even though these days there are hot hatchbacks that approach the power output of this, 400bhp didn’t make me feel short-changed.

In fact, I suspect the acceleration time would be more impressive were the Evora 400 not stymied by the perennial Lotus problem: the obtrusiveness of the gearshift that comes hooked to the engine.

Take your time and be patient with shifts and it’ll slot home fine, but try to pull through changes as quickly as you would in, say, a manual Porsche Cayman, and sometimes it’ll mildly baulk at the idea, or, on occasion, say, if you’re braking and/or have some lateral loading on, be more stubborn still. The brake pedal’s travel is long, too, which even though the brakes are superb, it makes heel-and-toeing difficult.

Last time Autocar road tested an Evora, our cover line was: ‘World’s best handling car, but…’. Quite a lot has happened since then, and not just to the Lotus.

Porsche has launched the latest Cayman (including the GT4) and the 911 GTS, for a start. So although the Evora has received some wholesale and remarkably significant changes – while having its price increased to the best part of £75,000 – the competition hasn’t exactly been doing nowt either.

The Evora 400 is, though, hugely improved. World’s best handling car, then? Well, it’s not a million miles away. And while there is a ‘but…’, at least this time the ‘but’ is smaller, and has more to do with what comes out of Stuttgart than something inherently flawed about what emerges from Hethel. Which, indeed, is progress.

2015 Lotus Evora 400