Emira

Lotus Emira: The Last Combustion Car, Built Like the First

When Lotus unveiled the Emira on 6 July 2021, the company did something few manufacturers ever do with a brand-new sports car: it told buyers, from the very first press release, that this would be the last one of its kind the company would ever build. Lotus was explicit that the Emira would be its final combustion-engined model, positioned as the closing statement of a mechanical tradition running back through the Evora, Exige, Elise, Esprit, Europa, and ultimately the Elan, even as the same company was simultaneously preparing an all-electric hypercar, the Evija, and a lineup of electric SUVs and saloons under its expanding 'Lotus Technology' business. That framing gave the Emira's launch a weight most new sports cars never carry. Reviewers and buyers alike were invited to think of it as a kind of eulogy for a hundred years of internal combustion engineering, delivered by the company that had spent much of that century arguing that a sports car should above all be light.

Mechanically, the Emira replaced the entire Elise/Exige/Evora family in one stroke, consolidating three overlapping model lines into a single, better-resourced successor built around a bonded aluminium chassis in the tradition Lotus had followed since 1996. From launch, buyers could choose between two very different characters under the skin: a supercharged 3.5-litre Toyota V6, carried over in updated form from the outgoing Evora and representing the continuation of Lotus's long practice of buying proven engines from Toyota rather than developing new ones in-house, or a turbocharged 2.0-litre four-cylinder sourced from Mercedes-AMG. It is the same basic M139 unit that powers hot Mercedes-AMG hatchbacks, reworked by Lotus engineers for mid-engine installation. The dual-engine strategy let Lotus offer both a familiar, naturally characterful six-cylinder experience and a smaller, more efficient turbocharged option, while hedging against the increasing difficulty of sourcing high-output naturally aspirated or lightly boosted engines from partners who were themselves electrifying their own lineups.

The Emira's styling, penned under Lotus's in-house design team, deliberately avoided the extreme wedge language of the Esprit or the stripped-back minimalism of the Elise, instead presenting a rounder, more resolved shape that critics generally read as Lotus's most conventionally 'finished' design in years. It was an implicit acknowledgment that the car needed to compete on showroom polish against increasingly sophisticated rivals from Porsche and Alpine, rather than winning purely on the raw, unfiltered feel that had defined the Elise a quarter-century earlier. Reviewers broadly praised the cabin quality as a significant step up from the famously spartan Elise and Exige, a deliberate move by Lotus to make the car viable as a daily driver rather than purely a weekend toy, even as the fundamental mid-engine, driver-focused layout remained recognizably Lotus underneath.

Commercially, the Emira arrived with a great deal riding on it. Under Chinese ownership through Geely, Lotus had committed to an ambitious, capital-intensive electrification strategy, and the Emira needed to succeed both as a standalone product and as a bridge that could fund the transition to the company's electric future. Early results suggested the strategy was working: reported Lotus Group deliveries rose from roughly 6,970 vehicles in 2023 to about 12,134 in 2024, with Emira-specific deliveries reported at roughly 5,272 in 2024, more than double the 2,609 reported for 2023. On those reported figures, Emira deliveries roughly doubled in a car only a few years into its production life; as with any model still in production, they are yearly delivery counts rather than a final production total.

Even as the Emira sold, Lotus signaled that its position as the marque's 'last' combustion car was not necessarily permanent in mechanical detail, if not in spirit: reporting indicated the company was planning to move later Emira variants away from the launch-era Toyota and AMG engines toward a new Lotus-developed hybrid V6, a shift that would let the model continue in production for longer while nudging its powertrain closer to the electrified direction of the rest of the Lotus range. Whatever the precise mechanical path, the marketing position has remained central to how the car is discussed in the press and among enthusiasts: this is where combustion Lotus sports cars end. That gives the Emira an unusual dual identity as both the newest and, avowedly, the last of its kind.

Set against the arc of Lotus's earlier sports cars, the Emira reads less as a rupture than as a continuation under new conditions. Like the Elan, it uses a bonded/extruded structural approach chosen for stiffness-to-weight efficiency rather than manufacturing tradition. Like the Esprit and Europa, it buys its engines from larger manufacturers rather than developing them in isolation. And like the Elise, Exige, and Evora before it, it exists because Lotus's small-volume business model has always depended on finding partners (Ford, Renault, Rover, Toyota, Mercedes-AMG) willing to supply engines a company of Lotus's scale could never justify building alone. What makes the Emira distinct is simply that, for the first time in that sixty-year lineage, Lotus has told its customers explicitly that the formula is coming to an end, and that everything after this car will run on batteries instead.

Emira GT4: The First Car From Lotus Advanced Performance

The Emira's motorsport career began almost as soon as the road car did. The Emira GT4 was the first product from Lotus Advanced Performance, the marque's motorsport and experimental division, developed in partnership with the RML Group and given its public dynamic debut with hot laps around the Hethel test track in May 2022. Those laps were a demonstration of the road car's underlying structure rather than a heavily disguised prototype.

The car's global race debut came at the Greater Bay GT Cup, held on Macau's demanding Guia street circuit, in November 2023, where it finished 1st and 2nd in the GT4 class with drivers Lou Kailou and Adam Christodoulou taking the top two positions. Under the skin, the race car uses the same 3.5-litre supercharged Toyota V6 fitted to the road-going six-cylinder Emira, tuned to roughly 400 horsepower and paired with an Xtrac six-speed sequential gearbox and limited-slip differential. The result is a genuinely direct line from the road car's Toyota-sourced engine choice to a functioning competition programme rather than a bespoke racing powertrain built from scratch.

Russell Carr's Long Arc: From Esprit Sport 300 to Emira 420 Sport

One designer's career connects the Emira directly back to the wedge-era Esprit variants. Russell Carr's first assignment on joining Lotus was the Esprit Sport 300, a rare, track-focused final-era Esprit built in small numbers; roughly three and a half decades later, as Lotus's head of design since 2014, Carr helped shape the Emira and, specifically, the performance-oriented Emira 420 Sport. Carr's working life thus carries an unbroken thread from one of the company's rarest 1990s specials to its newest and, for now, last combustion model.

The Emira's exterior itself was designed by Daniel Durrant, working under Carr's direction, with Jon Statham responsible for the interior. It is a reminder that even a car marketed heavily around its status as 'the last one' was, like every Lotus before it, the product of a specific, named design team rather than an anonymous corporate process.

Customer Racing After Macau: British GT and the GT4 European Series

Macau turned out to be a beginning rather than a one-off. Lotus followed the Guia circuit result with an upgraded "enhanced performance" specification of the GT4, announced in June 2023: output rose more than ten percent to a reported 455 hp, and the original Xtrac gearbox gave way to a new Hewland six-speed sequential unit, alongside reworked aerodynamics, brakes, springs, dampers, and cooling. First examples of the revised car were shipped to customers that summer, with orders arriving from the UK, mainland Europe, China, Australia, and the United States. Public reporting does not establish whether the works-affiliated cars that raced at Macau in November 2023 carried this enhanced specification or the earlier one, so the car's output is reported as both roughly 400 hp and 455 hp.

The Emira GT4 returned to British soil for the 2024 British GT Championship, where Mahiki Racing entered two cars in the marque's long-awaited return to the series. The programme scored its first British podium at round three, the Silverstone 500, where Ian Duggan and Gordie Mutch's #20 car took the GT4 Pro-Am class win and finished third in GT4 outright, with Mutch also setting a new outright GT4 qualifying lap record around the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit that same weekend. Mahiki expanded its Lotus programme to three Emira GT4s for the 2025 season. Across the Channel, PB Racing fielded an Emira GT4 for Stefano D'Aste and Alberto Naska as the official Lotus entry in the 2025 GT4 European Series Pro-Am class, taking the model's first outright win in that championship at Spa-Francorchamps before PB Racing doubled its commitment to two Emira GT4s for 2026. This is a pattern of gradually widening customer adoption that, several years after Hethel, has moved the GT4 from a single works-backed entry into an ordinary, if still developing, item of privateer GT4 machinery.

The Emira Cup: A Second, Turbocharged Racing Line

Not every competition Emira runs the supercharged V6. Lotus Cup China, a one-make series organised with the Mitime Group, races a distinct "Emira Cup" car built from the turbocharged Emira i4. The car retains the roadgoing Mercedes-AMG-sourced M139 2.0-litre four and its eight-speed dual-clutch transmission largely unaltered, with race-specific additions limited to a roll cage, uprated brakes and dampers, and a reinforced chassis. Where the GT4 traces a direct line back to the Toyota-sourced six, the Emira Cup does the same for the car's other launch engine, giving both halves of the Emira's dual-powertrain strategy their own, separate competition programme. The series ran a five-round 2025 season with its finale at Malaysia's Sepang circuit, and is scheduled to open an expanded 2026 calendar at the same venue. A second one-make series, Lotus Cup Italy, run by PB Racing, has fielded Emira racers on a club basis since at least 2023; Massimo Abbati and Alberto Naska have each held that title, with Naska going on to co-drive PB Racing's GT4 European Series entry. Naska's path is a small illustration of how the marque's one-make grids have doubled as a proving ground for drivers who then step up to the international GT4 programme.