Waiting times

[Porter]

Yes, I’ve been thinking the same thing. It actually makes me wonder too if the Evora may be the more collectible car, either at the beginning or end of production. The Evora GT here in the US is a particularly good drivers car and the late versions, although a bit quirky (a good thing), are plenty well appointed for me. What do folks think about this collectibility question?

I think one of the big reasons the Evora never sold well in the US is that it never clearly presented conceptually to the public as a complete product. For a brand that has had a big public awareness deficit in a large market like the US, they certainly didn't do much to dispel the weirdly persistent notion of the brand as a "kit car" manufacturer. I mean for goodness sake, the Evora had a slapped-in aftermarket Alpine stereo in the dash, which was a perfectly reasonable engineering decision to deliver a functional audio solution with minimal additional design costs, but unfortunately it sort of screamed "this car contains 1990s engineering" to US buyers. It's a completely unfair perception, but it got mentioned early and dismissively in every review that I ever saw of the Evora by any US press during the first 5+ years of its availability. It poisoned the well for what should have been a halo product for the brand, and one better suited to the US market than any previous product since the Esprit.

The brand image thing has been a big problem for Lotus in the US, particularly in terms of basic awareness and mindshare. Until very recently, I'd say that Caterham and Lotus have had too much brand awareness overlap in the US... when you say "Lotus" even among car people the first thing that many think of is vintage reproductions like the Caterham 7, not modern Lotus' like the Elise, because the Elise and Exige were only available here briefly and were very low-volume products at best. Lotus only exceeded 1000 cars sold a year (all models combined!) in the US in 4 individual model years (2005-2008) and then fell right back off a cliff into ultra-niche volumes. The Elise/Exige stopped being sold in the US more than a decade ago. I'm sure that the small percentage of people in the general public that may have been tangentially aware of Lotus could be excused for thinking that they had gone entirely out of business.

All of that is to say, the Evora will almost certainly be collectible. But the public perception of it has needed the tempering of time in order for the original first reactions of the automotive press to become less relevant to buyer behavior in the marketplace. The last two years has seen a pretty extreme rehabilitation of the Evora's image among non-Lotus-specific car enthusiasts, as the rapid approach of the EV changeover has caused skyrocketing interest in driving experience over pure speed. Extremely positive "why didn't I love this all along, this thing is great" video reviews from people like Matt Farah and other YouTube stars have helped a great deal as well.

US sales volumes for Lotus by year, all models combined: