Key considerations
- Available for £52,000
- 3.5-litre V8 petrol twin-turbo, rear-wheel drive
- Goes like hell and has a fab chassis
- Renault transmission is weak, so tune with care
- Some cars have been horribly unreliable, others have been fine
- Rare and possibly undervalued – but it is a Lotus of a certain age
Designed by a genius and built by enthusiasts, the Lotus Esprit has been delighting and delighting and to some extent frustrating owners since 1976. With a composite body on a steel spine chassis and powered by various versions of Lotus’s 2.0 (and later 2.2) litre turbo four sitting longitudinally behind the passengers, the first Giugiaro-designed Esprit started life with less than 150hp at its disposal. It therefore looked a lot faster than it actually was, even with under a tonne to push along, but the application of heavy turbocharging eventually gave the Esprit the right sort of go to match the show and they still looked great.
The final gen-one Turbo Esprit HC had 215hp and 220lb ft, which might not sound a lot these days but with a mere 1,148kg to shift the power-to-weight ratio was a handy 187hp per tonne, enough to hustle it through the 0-60mph run in 5.6sec and go on to a top speed of 152mph.
After those three iterations of the gen-one Esprit, the second-generation car of 1988 was reimagined in a rounder, less pointy way by British freelance designer extraordinaire Peter Stevens. Not only was the shape new, so was the stuff it was made out of, a Lotus-patented vacuum-assisted resin with Kevlar roof strengthening replacing the clunky old hand-laid fibreglass. The old 900-series four-pot engines were still going in naturally aspirated and turbocharged formats, with Citroen or Renault transaxles depending on the model. An intercooled version with multipoint fuel injection was turning out 264hp, or 286hp in the ‘Type 105’ race cars that contested the SCCA Escort World Challenge series in 1990.
Twenty road-legal homologation Type 105s, dubbed X180Rs, were made for the American market in 1991. Two years later, fifty Sport 300 derivatives of the X180R putting out 302hp were built for Europe, followed by the S4 Sport and the GT3 in 1994, representing the last hurrah of the four-cylinder Esprit.
Up to that point, Lotus had been a small manufacturer making small cars with small engines, so the launch of the Esprit V8 in 1996 was a headline-making event, especially as Lotus was once again going down the expensive route of building its own engine. The 918 was an all-aluminium flat-plane 3.5 litre V8 with two Garrett turbochargers (two turbos being quite a thing back then) giving it a claimed output of 350hp. Its reputed potential maximum was 500hp but the venerable Renault transmission that Lotus was still using couldn’t handle that amount of power so it was scaled back to a less grenade-y level.
The V8 was fast enough though, even with only 350hp. Weight had inevitably increased from the gen-one’s 1,148kg to the gen-two’s new figure of 1,378kg, but the power hike more than compensated for it. In the 1,300kg 350 Sport, Lotus’s ultimate V8 of 1999, the engine was remapped to deliver the same amount of power as the regular V8 but at different points in the rev range. The 350 Sport also had a lighter body, stiffer springs, a big carbon rear wing on aluminium uprights and AP Racing brakes. It had an impressive power-to-weight figure of 268hp/tonne. TVR’s bonkers Cerbera beat that number but not much else on the road at that time did.
In SE and GT guises, SE being the everyday V8 and the GT being the lighter, sportier one, the 0-60mph time began with a four and 0-100mph came up in well under 11 seconds. Obviously you paid for that kind of enthusiastic driving at the pumps. The official average fuel consumption figure was a slightly scary 21mpg. The reality for lead-footed owners was nearer to 14mpg but the bods who could afford that sort of car could also stomach that kind of profligacy.
By 2004 the Esprit V8 had been quietly removed from the sales brochure. A rather beautiful new Esprit concept with a 612hp Lexus V8, a 3.5sec 0-60 time and a top speed of 195mph was unveiled at the 2010 Paris show for production in 2014 but sadly it was canned in that year, supposedly to free the company up to produce more lightweight cars. Not sure what happened there.
Classic values revolve around rarity and desirability, and the Esprit V8 is scoring hard on at least one of those fronts. Altogether, including the gen-one, well over 10,000 Esprits were built, but fewer than 1,500 of them were V8s. Five in every six of those were regular V8 SEs, with around 200 V8 GTs and no more than 50 Sport 350s. As of mid-2024 there were fewer than a hundred V8s of any designation still licensed in the UK, which is quite an attrition rate for an expensive, limited-run sports car.
Interestingly however the gradual decline in licensed numbers has stabilised in the last few years. V8s were around £60k new. Good used examples were going for the same sort of money in 2020, and again for not much less than that in 2024. We saw one of the last V8s made, a three-owner 2003 car with 27,000 miles, advertised at a fiver short of £90k, suggesting that the market might still be in a ‘suck it and see’ state dictated by the shortage of cars available, but then we saw a two-owner ’98 GT with 34,000 miles on it for £55,500, and some even cheaper ones on PH Classifieds which we’ll link you to at the end.
When the market determines that V8 prices have officially bottomed out, which they must surely be close to doing, then you’d expect more commercially aware restorers to swing into action, lifting the number of licensed cars – and the prices. With all that in mind, could now be the best time to invest in what was Britain’s only mid-engined supercar?
SPECIFICATION | LOTUS ESPRIT V8 (1996-2004)
Engine: 3,506cc V8 32v twin-turbo petrol
Transmission: 5-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 350@6,500rpm
Torque (lb ft): 295@4,250rpm
0-62mph (secs): 4.9
Top speed (mph): 175
Weight (kg): 1,378
MPG (official combined): 21.2
Wheels (in): 8.5 x 17 (f), 10 x 18 (r)
Tyres: 235/40 (f), 285/35 (r)
On sale: 1996 - 2004
Price new: £60,000
Price now: from £52,000
Note for reference: car weight and power data is hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.
ENGINE & GEARBOX
Developing the 3.5 litre V8 cost Lotus a fortune, reputedly considerably more than it cost them to develop the entire Elise. Despite being made mainly from aluminium, keeping the percentage weight increase over the old 2.0/2.2 four down to 15 per cent, in actual avoirdupois it was 50kg more. On the other hand, the V8 was physically no larger than the four, and its large displacement allied to the car’s lightness meant that the Esprit V8 never felt short-changed on performance. From nought to a hundred it left rivals like the Porsche Carrera 2 and the Ferrari F355 behind.
Obviously this car was built before turbochargers were being as brilliantly integrated into drivetrains as they are now, so the throttle response could never be described as instant and there wasn’t much thrust below 2,500rpm. The noise wasn’t that inspiring either, but that’s flat-plane V8s for you.
The redline was quite low at 7,000rpm and the twin turbochargers were only running at half a bar so it was a usefully unstressed unit, but even so early (pre-1998) V8s did suffer from water leaks between the liners and the block. Lotus covered most of these claims under warranty which was just as well as the engine had to be pulled for the repair to be carried out. The issue was resolved on later cars by changing the liner sealant so you would be extremely unlucky to find one still waiting to go off on the used market.
Occasionally overheating coil packs were a design issue arising from their positioning between the engine and the intake plenum. Timing was by cambelt. This needed to be checked for tension every 12,000 miles and replaced every 36,000 miles. If it snapped it bent valves. Exhausts and heat shields cracked and there were also problems with leaking radiators and broken fans.
The action of the Renault gearbox and clutch were from a different age. Lever throw was slow and the pedal was heavy, and that was when they were new, so you’ll definitely want to ensure that you can cope with it on a used example. There was meant to be a lighter AP Racing clutch coming along later in the production run. We can say with some surety that the gearbox is the car’s weakest link. Driven hard they would blow second and fifth gears and/or input shafts. Tuned cars running higher turbo boost pressures were particularly vulnerable to transmission problems. Owners should perhaps have taken note of Lotus’s own ‘detuning’ of the engine.
We mentioned the fuel consumption figures earlier. The official average fuel consumption figure was a slightly scary 21mpg, with precious little improvement on that when you were cruising, but at least the near-16 gallon tank was large enough to give you a realistic fill-to-fill range of 300 miles.
CHASSIS
Immediate, sweet steering has become commonplace now but it was certainly not a given in the late 1990s, even on expensive cars. The Esprit was a refreshing exception. Every nuance of the road surface was fed back to the wheel rim along with initially alarming but ultimately benign kickback over bigger bumps and ridges. There was also flat cornering, big-hearted chuckability through hairpins and a sensation of security and road-hugging comfort that seemed to improve the faster you went, underlying the continuing fitness for purpose of the old steel spine chassis. You did need to be aware of the limited ground clearance though. There was no nose lift on the options list.
The pedal travel for the ventilated disc brakes was quite short, making them hard to modulate in traffic, but at higher speeds on the open road they were great. Lower suspension arm bushings are consumable items on these cars. Five-spoke OZ racing split-rim wheels were a desirable factory alternative to the six-spokes put on at launch.
BODYWORK
By the time the V8 came out in 1996 the basic Esprit design had been knocking around for over two decades but it still looked sharp in ’96 and it does now nearly half a century later. That’s quite an achievement. The ‘dancing V8’ badge on the rear panel, the additional exhaust pipe and a very lightly modded front bumper were the only points of difference between the V8 and the lesser Esprits. It was perhaps a pity that they didn’t make more of it.
Owners of modern cars might feel faint at the size of some of the Esprit’s panel gaps but at least the gaps were mainly uniform and the panels themselves were smooth. Most misgivings in that department would be forgotten on the first use of the pop-up headlamps. The C5 Corvette retained this design feature for longer than the Lotus, but only by a few months, and then it was gone and nobody was doing it.
It looked like the V8 had two fuel filler points, one on each side of the car behind the side windows, but in fact only one was functional. That was a hangover from earlier Esprits that did have two working filler pipes. On the V8 the cap panel was released by a button that you couldn’t see from your seat, a useful though possibly accidental thief-frustrater. The release for the front-hinged front bonnet was a letterbox-shaped length of pipe hiding in the footwell that you had to push forward to release the latch and pull back to re-engage. Mind you, there was no reason to go into the frunk unless you wanted to access the spare tyre, fuses or screen washer bottle that were randomly arranged in there, because there was no space for anything else.
There was a removable and practicably boot-stowable roof panel which for a few hundred quid extra could be supplied in glass. Parts sharing was a practice commonly employed by Lotus to keep its cars affordable. The rear tail lights were lifted straight from a late-1980s Toyota Corolla E90.
INTERIOR
You can see how Lotus was trying to get away from the walnut and moo that typified their earlier cars and nearer to the sort of minimalism that would typify their later ones. Leather was still used on the Esprit, but it wasn’t the superfine stuff that might have matured in the right direction twenty-odd years later. Other elements like the self-tapping screws and the aftermarket audio speakers contributed to dragging the ambience into a kind of halfway house condition that was neither sportingly sparse nor lusciously luxurious. Overall, the feelgood factor was noticeably down on anything Ferrari was putting out.
That parts-sharing thing we were talking about a minute ago didn’t help in this regard as it was glaringly obvious on the inside of the Esprit. The steering wheel was pinched from the Saturn, one of the cheapest cars in the General Motors range. The mirror and window switches were generic, and the array of five buttons above the radio was from a Peugeot 106.
If you’re six foot plus and the owner of large feet you are going to be slightly compromised by the Esprit. For a start, getting in and out won’t be easy. The steering wheel was fixed, the seat bases were oddly long, and the top of your nut will feel like it’s ‘inside’ the roof panel recess. The footwell wasn’t hugely roomy and it contained a pedal set that some will find awkwardly offset. The fold-down handbrake was a neat space-saving touch but there were a lot of distracting reflections in the near-flat windscreen at night and rear vision was really poor even in daylight.
You’ll be made constantly aware of the ‘living and breathing’ nature of the Esprit by the creaks and groans it emits as it goes along. There was a good amount of tyre and wind noise and refinement generally wasn’t top-notch – but would you buy something like an Esprit expecting Bentley levels of NVH? Thanks to the compactness of the engine the luggage space behind the engine was usefully large, which was just as well as in-cabin storage opportunities were limited to a document pocket between the seats. There was no glove box or centre console. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of anything inside an Esprit, but you did get air conditioning and, essentially for the age, twin ashtrays, one in each door. Having praised it for having air con, we immediately have to diss it because the compressors and associated components weren’t the best for reliability.
PH VERDICT
Someone on the internet said that he regretted buying an Esprit V8 while he had it, but when he sold it he regretted that even more. Esprits get you like that. Although the V8s were by no means cheap, you could argue that in 2024 they’re less expensive than they should be, bearing in mind their performance, rarity and exoticism. You have to put these suppressed values down to the reputation Lotus carefully acquired for unreliability, but it would be wrong to damn every Lotus with that dirty old brush. The engine certainly had issues early doors and might have been aurally uninspiring but the rabid performance it unlocked, combined with the ability of the chassis to handle it, made you hoot with delight.
True, some owners went through various kinds of hell with their V8s. One PHer who reckoned he had bought the second V8 out of the factory to be sold in the UK said he had had two new gearboxes, four new clutches, twelve (!) catalytic converters, a new radiator, and at just under 33,000 miles a new engine. The odd ‘lemon’ cars do seem to have been really lemony, but other owners have enjoyed a blissfully trouble-free experience, including those who have been regularly caning their cars on trackdays.
You did have to be brave though to buy one in preference to a Carrera 2 for more or less the same money in 1996. Parts of the Lotus’s cabin did look more home-made than hand-crafted. Some of the ‘borrowed’ parts came from a much earlier time, and significant physical demands were placed on passengers not just on getting in and out but also on getting comfortable once you were in, but in 2024 the gap between the Lotus and the Porsche in terms of the amount of purchasing bravery required looks somewhat narrower. Firms like Esprit Engineering near Salisbury in Wiltshire carry plenty of spares, either original or remanufactured, and they are happy to take on repairs, servicing or recommissioning of classis Loti.
The most affordable Esprit V8 on PH Classifieds at the time of writing was this retrimmed 2000 specimen in mustard at £52,500. If you don’t like the colourways or the 51,000 miles on that, here’s a less challenging ’99 car in red with 42,000 miles (pictured) and a bushel of nice modifications including a chargecooling system, Quaife diff and close ratio gearbox. That one is £54,995. Perhaps the most interesting V8 on PH at the time of writing was this 1998 SE in blue (pictured). By the sounds of it, it’s been completely rebuilt from the inside out. Yours for £64,950.
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