Lotus Exige

Lotus Exige

Lotus Cars

Production2000–2021 / 10,497 produced
Enginetransmission =

Among the 104 Lotus Cars entries in the MotorJury library, the Lotus Exige holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 2000. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Lotus Exige properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Hyundai Hyundai Santa Fe, the Škoda Auto Škoda Fabia, the Toyota Toyota Yaris — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lotus Exige reads like this: the record lists its engine as transmission =; kerb weight is recorded at 2015 lb / 2593 lb; drive goes through length =; the layout is Rear mid-engine, rear-wheel drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Lotus Cars story

Within Lotus Cars's own catalogue the Lotus Exige sits alongside the Lotus 100T, the Lotus 101, the Lotus 102, the Lotus 107. The record names the successor = Lotus Emira as its predecessor and the Lotus Emira as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Julian Thomson. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Hethel, Norfolk.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Lotus Exige was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.

Specifications

Transmissionlength =
LayoutRear mid-engine, rear-wheel drive
Kerb weight2015 lb / 2593 lb
Wheelbase2300 mm
Length379 cm
AssemblyUnited Kingdom: Hethel, Norfolk
DesignerJulian Thomson
Predecessorsuccessor = Lotus Emira
SuccessorLotus Emira
Catalogue IDQ1141769

Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.

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What it costs to run

Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.

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Rivals of its era

Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.