New mid-engined sports car will be the last petrol engined Lotus to be made, all First Edition V6 units allocated for Singapore already booked 

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SINGAPORE

Lotus Cars Singapore gave the local media a sneak preview of the car that is set to succeed the Elise, Exige and Evora yesterday. The all-new Lotus Emira is claimed to be built on the same design language as the brand’s Evija concept, and will have two powerplant options in the form of a Toyota-sourced 3.5-litre supercharged V6 and a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder from Mercedes-AMG.

Just 15 units of the Emira V6 First Edition have been allocated for Singapore from the first production run of the car. Lotus Cars Singapore says that they have all been spoken for by interested buyers despite the price not yet having been officially confirmed. It’s expected to cost around S$450,000 without COE, and set to arrive in the third quarter of 2022.

The ‘regular’ V6 Emira that will roll in after the First Edition is also said to have a long waiting list already lined up.

The First Edition specification Emira will have a list of additional options fitted as standard along with special badging denoting the car’s unique status. These include LED lights, a titanium exhaust finisher, reverse sensors, 12-way adjustable seats and cruise control. It will also have smartphone connectivity, a KEF audio system, and what Lotus calls the Lower Black Pack, which has the aerodynamic elements along the bottom edges of the car finished in gloss black.

The 3.5-litre V6 engine used in the Emira has Toyota’s 2GR-FE engine block as its core, and is given a boost with an Edelbrock 1740 supercharger for a torque output of 420Nm and maximum power of 400hp. It’s an uprated version of the powerplant found in the Lotus Exige Sport 350. 

You can get it with a six-speed manual or six-speed automatic transmission, which interestingly has its engine mapped to deliver an extra 10Nm of torque over the manual version though maximum power output remains unchanged.

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Another interesting factoid is that while the automatic transmission is a traditional box that uses a torque converter rather than a quick-shifting twin-clutch system, it is 0.1 seconds quicker to 100km/h from a standing start over the manual version’s quoted 4.3 seconds.

Set to arrive at a later date is the four-cylinder turbo version of the Emira, powered by what Lotus calls ‘a bespoked version of AMG’s M139 direct injection engine’, mated to an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission. Specially tuned to work in the mid-engined Lotus Emira, the M139 in standard Mercedes-AMG form is still the world’s most powerful 2.0-litre series production internal combustion engine built to date, and can be found in a bunch of Mercedes-AMG cars including the CLA 45 S. Lotus has not revealed its power output in the Emira, but it’s expected to be somewhere between 360 to 400 horsepower.

If this usage of other brand’s engines sounds strange to you, it’s down to the fact that Lotus has traditionally been a chassis builder and since the late 1990s, has sourced the most suitable powerplants from other makers to fit into its cars. For example, the Series 2 Lotus Exige from 2004 used a Toyota 2ZZ GE engine from the Toyota Celica, and the Lotus Elise from the same time period was powered by a Rover K-Series engine.

Lotus states that the Emira is a major shift in the brand’s positioning as a premium sports car maker. Designed to be more luxurious and practical, with the ability to function as both a grand tourer and focused trackday machine, the Emira is looking to be quite a different type of sports car from the Elise and Exige. Two-seater mid engined coupes in this price range are a rare breed these days though, and we expect it to go head-to-head with the similarly priced Porsche Cayman GTS. This is also set to be the last of the fossil-fuel burning cars from Lotus, with the brand aiming to make a shift to electric power over the next decade.

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