If you hang around the MindTribe lounge long enough, in addition to becoming current on the latest Internet memes, you’ll hear passionate sales pitches from one of us to another.
You’d swear a royalty check was involved, or that we’re selling one of the thousands of products in that picture.
In actuality, great products are an inspiration to us. We know they’re the result of a talented team successfully forging it’s way through a jungle of thick vegetation, quicksand, and wild beasts conspiring to steer the team toward the Land of Mediocrity.
I wouldn’t be the first engineer to claim that the team behind the Lotus Elise successfully navigated this jungle, coming out the other side nearly unscathed. If an engineering team ever wore out their Rocky Theme Song cassingle during the traverse, it must have been this one.
To appreciate what’s the big deal with this car, you have to understand its mission: to provide extremely high performance at a relatively low price point. To pull this off, there are a host of elegant engineering solutions and optimizations, as well as some admittedly small details that simply offer up a geek-out moment in the right company.
The first (right) and second (left) generation Lotus Elise
Much of the engineering challenge of the Elise was to make the car weigh as little as possible. The lighter a car, the more adept it is when the road isn’t straight, and the better it responds to both the gas and brake pedals.
The backbone of the car, or chassis, is the starting point for the rest of a car. Lightness is important here as a lighter chassis means a smaller (lighter) engine can be used, which means smaller brakes and tires can be used, and so forth.
To achieve chassis lightness, Lotus engineers came up with a novel idea for a production car: glue it together. Yep, just glue. No, not the body panels or trim—the load-bearing structure for the entire car. Why glue? The more traditional process—welding—heats metal up and weakens it, thus requiring thicker metal to compensate. Gluing enables use of the thinnest—and therefore lightest—metal structures possible.
A glimpse behind the front wheel reveals orange-colored glue holding the chassis together
Another exciting aspect of the car is the extensive use of aluminum extrusions: they’re fast and cheap compared to equivalent tooling to form, stamp, and assemble traditional sheets of steel. Think of squeezing a toothpaste tube where the toothpaste is aluminum and the opening of the tube is the shape of the desired part. Engineers can quickly and inexpensively create building blocks for a car, and easily change the basic dimensions to create other vehicles.
Aluminum extrusions can be seen throughout the cockpit—note the chassis side rails and structural cross-member integrated with the dash
The same extrusion process can be used for chassis rails and door hinges
To further minimize weight, the body of the car is made of thin fiberglass. It also enables creation of tighter “bends” in the surface and more complex shapes than sheet metal, which both designers and engineers are a fan of.
Fiberglass body panels are lightweight and enable complex shapes
Aside from minimizing mass, there are some noteworthy aerodynamic mechanisms built into the car to maximize performance.
To aid stability at speed and reduce drag, one wants air to flow as smoothly as possible beneath the car (think of the bottom of a boat moving through water). The bottom of the Elise is nearly completely flat to aid in achieving this goal.
The Elise’s flat bottom
At the rear of the car, a diffuser panel manages airflow for a clean transition out from beneath the bottom of the car to minimize flow separation—a low-pressure eddy current of air following the car around, doing its best to slow it down whenever the car is in motion.
The rear diffuser manages airflow as it exits the bottom of the car
If you were sitting in a desk chair, and you wanted a friend to start spinning you around as fast as possible, would you hold your arms outstretched or tightly next to your body? If you held them next to your body, you would reduce your polar moment of inertia, or resistance to turning. Now what about if you were holding an engine in said chair on a twisty road? You’d want it on your lap, as close as possible to the chair’s axis of rotation. The Elise is a mid-engined design, enabling some of the heaviest parts of the car—engine, transmission, and passengers—to huddle together near the middle of the car (the “tub” design of the chassis also allows passengers to sit extremely low to the ground, which also makes for better handling dynamics).
Engine and passengers sit together near the middle of the car to decrease polar moment of inertia, or resistance to turning
As for the geek-out details on the Elise, it is one of the few modern cars available without power steering, enabling a sense of feeling the road with one’s fingertips. Everything in the car that looks like metal is metal, and all the vents on the car are functional. Air for the radiator flows in through the big center opening, and out beneath the windshield. There is an oil cooler behind each of the smaller front openings, and air for the engine intake and cooling flows through the side gills.
All vents have a (functional) purpose
How does everything come together on the road?
No two cars are optimized for exactly the same circumstances, so comparing them is a bit apples and oranges. But for sake of discussion, let’s park the Elise next to a couple of other small, iconic sports cars—the Mazda MX-5 Miata and Porsche 911—to see how they compare.
The 911, Miata, and Elise are similar in size (911 wheelbase 92.5″, Miata 89.2″, Elise 90.5″, whereas a BMW 3-Series Coupe is 107.3″*). Yet the Miata weighs in nearly 500 pounds more than the 1,975 pound Elise (and doesn’t include an integrated rollbar, like the Elise), while the 911 is a full 1,100 pounds heavier than the Elise (though it does include two tiny back seats and is much more comfortable and practical than the Elise).
Why does the weight matter? Take a look at acceleration times for the Porsche and Elise, which are nearly identical around 4.8 seconds for a 0-60 mph run. The Elise manages a (revised) EPA rating of 20/25/22 mpg (city/highway/combined), while the Porsche is 16/24/19. The Miata, with the same engine size as the Elise of 1.8L, is closer in fuel consumption to the Elise as you would expect at 20/26/23, but is significantly slower to 60 mph at 7.7 seconds.
Cost-wise, the price (for the base 2005 model year) of the Miata ($22,098) is roughly half of the Elise ($39,985), while the Porsche ($69,300) is about one-and-three-quarters that of the Elise. Strictly performance-wise, the Elise is a deal compared to the 911, turning in similar performance numbers. That’s not to say the Elise is the best choice given the Porsche would be significantly more practical and comfortable as a daily driver, and the Miata provides incredible bang-for-the-buck. But on purely performance-per-dollar merit, the Elise is hard to beat, which was the intended destination when the Lotus team set out through the jungle.
* All vehicle data based on 2005 model year. Vehicle data sourced from Edmunds.com, autos.aol.com, and respective vehicle manufacturers.