Light fantastic
Esquire Singapore|May 2020
If you can live without most creature comforts, the flyweight Lotus Exige is about as engaging and rewarding a sports car as you can get.
Daryl Lee
Light fantastic
Driving the Lotus Exige even for the briefest of moments will throw up a fair amount of interesting questions. Standing tall among those questions are: what you can live without in your sports car?

A plethora of electronic chassis aids that could put a spaceship to shame? Adaptive suspension that’s pillowy on rougher roads while being rock solid on a racetrack? A snazzy touchscreen infotainment system with accompanying digital instrument cluster? Electrically adjustable bucket seats with various memory positions?

How about a glove box? How much does interior carpeting and floor mats mean to you? Can you do without electrically-adjustable wing mirrors? Are reclining seats important to you? Do you like good visibility out the rear window? Or, I don’t know, an easy ingress/egress procedure that doesn’t require you to be a contortionist?

These are all questions you’ll have to ask yourself before plonking down SGD300,000 (base price without COE and optional extras) for one of Hethel’s finest. It also helps if you put that figure in context because this is money you could very well spend on a Porsche 718 Boxster/Cayman, which has all of the things mentioned above. Most probably at a cost, but available nevertheless.

It also helps if you can drive a car with a manual transmission because that’s the only one on offer.

The Exige also makes one realise just how much stuff is stuffed into a modern sports car and how user-friendly virtually every aspect of the entire experience is. To say nothing of how heavy any modern sports car is, with kerb weights hovering around the 1.5-tonne mark.

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