The new Lotus Elise S costs about RM245,000, which is quite costly considering its size, but like always, a Lotus car is not renowned for its size, it is for the performance as well as the style which it exudes. The car comes with a 1.8liter Toyota Corolla Altis engine which has been fine tuned for performance. Of course, although Altis was never designed for performance due to its persona of being a family car, you can rest assure that the engine has been optimized to be revved up in this small wonder.
Boosting out at 135horsepower, the Lotus Elise is one car which is half the weight of the Altis and hence the power to weight ratio can be scarily fast. Compared to its older version, the engine could only boost out somewhere around 118 horsepowers. Put in its superior handling and performance and you have quite a great car to drive. With the additional horses added in this time around, it just makes this way better.
Ask anyone and you probably get the same feedback. If you are looking for some sort of family oriented ride, then this is definitely not the car for you. This is a no-nonsense fast car. You get to be pretty close to the ground when in this machine. In fact you are so close to the ground that you can almost feel the bumps and smell the tarmac. On top of that, you get the vibration of the engine throughout your drive. To top it all off, you get the loud growling roar of the engine inside (and pretty much outside as well).
The design of the car is pretty much the same as its earlier version, hence you can barely tell any difference in this machine. if you have seen the older one, chances are you cannot make any differences here. This car is typically a 2 seater, so really, you can forget about taking passengers for a ride (or if you must, take only 1).
The one thing that you can be 100% sure of about this car is regardless of what engine they put in, the car will outperform itself. All you need is an engine which is fast, fit it into the chassis and you get a superior handling car. Take it around bends, hit on the curves and you can barely feel any roll overs. It is almost as if, the laws of inertia do not apply here.
If you think you know what Lotus Handling is after having tried it out on the Proton Satria Neo or the Persona, then you haven’t know anything yet. This car handles superbly well. Period. Performance is the middle name here.