#LotusEvora400

TTAC Commentator arach writes:

Sajeev,

I need some car buying advice, and I’m not like one of those lame buyers who ask if they should buy a Honda or a Toyota, so you should definitely give me your 30 seconds of direction. (Fine, maybe this isn’t pointless. – SM)

When I wrote my review of the Lotus Evora 400 for our friends over at Jalopnik a couple of summers ago, I submitted it with the headline “The Lotus Evora 400 is the Best Dual-Purpose Car I Have Ever Driven.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t deemed to be a sexy enough headline, so it was switched to “Best Track Car.” Such is the life of a freelance contributor.

While there’s no doubt the Evora 400 shines on the racing line, its true genius is revealed on the highways and byways of these United States. It’s rare to find a car that can both quicken the pulse and comfort the soul as well as the Lotus does. To that end, when Lotus sent the Evora to my Old Kentucky Home for a week for some extended testing, I decided to revisit my original premise: Is the Lotus Evora 400 really the best dual-purpose car I’ve ever driven?

To find out, I decided to drive from Winchester, Kentucky to Dawsonville, Georgia and back in the same day, a round trip of 700 miles. Oh, and I figured that I might as well go to the SCCA’s Track Night in America at Atlanta Motorsports Park while I was at it. Dual-purpose? You bet.

Michael Phelps has won more gold medals in the pool at the last four Summer Olympics than the whole Team Canada claimed, across all events, in the last seven.

Despite currently producing more total medals per capita than the American team in Rio, we Canadians can be found suffering from an inferiority complex. And yes, per capita medal counts are the kinds of statistics you can expect from the citizens of a nation that suffer from an inferiority complex.

It doesn’t help that Canada’s new vehicle market, one-ninth the size of the U.S. market, is deemed too small to benefit from one of the planet’s best sports sedan values, the Chevrolet SS.

Yet the Chevrolet SS is by no means the only new vehicle on sale in the United States that doesn’t cross the border.

If you want to truly understand how the sausage of “automotive journalism” is made, there are two articles that you absolutely must read. The first is fun: it’s by Neal Pollack and it talks about the outrageous excesses of Mercedes PR’s “Pied Piper.” The second is long and occasionally tedious: it’s called “ Taking Readers For A Ride” and it was written for American Journalism Review by a fellow named Frank Greve with material assistance from … yours truly.

Most people know by now that the majority of new-car press introductions are absurdly sybaritic affairs, featuring five-star hotels, unlimited room service, outrageous gifts, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Why does Subaru have to introduce the XV Crosstrek in Iceland? The simple answer is that they didn’t … but they knew that the broke-ass journalists who used the trip as a vacation (and, in at least one case, a hookup) would treasure the trip for the rest of their lives.

This sort of thing distorts autowriting to a degree that is borderline insane. But if you listen to the PR people and their apologists in the media, they will tell you that there is just no other way to do it. Wrong answer. It’s possible to do a press intro on the cheap — and it’s also possible to make that intro the best one of all time.

While most car companies try to persuade broad swatches of people to buy their cars, Lotus is trying a new/old approach in promoting their new Evora 400 model, telling some folks that maybe Lotus’ fastest model is just not for them.