The Pleasure and the Pain

You don’t have to dig around very much to find horror stories about the Lotus Europa. Colin Chapman’s strange mid-engine “bread van” design is known for major structural problems, dodgy fiberglass and the kind of mechanical troubles only Lotus enthusiasts can tolerate.

The car’s reputation has kept prices low, but the Europa also has a well-deserved following of faithful owners, each with their own good reasons to keep that faith.

“It will out-handle just about anything on the road, even on crappy tires,” said Europa maven Daren Stone. “It’s also got credibility. You tell a car person you have a Europa and they know you are a car guy of the highest order.”

“It’s light, and it’s nimble,” said owner Jerry Boone. “I’ve owned competition cars that don’t handle as well. [But] it isn’t a car for the inattentive. It is a dance partner that expects as much from the driver as the driver expects from it. Do your part and the rewards are immeasurable.”

Surpassing the Elan

The Europa was conceived as an upgraded replacement for the well-loved Lotus Elan. Following Colin Chapman’s dictum of simplifying and adding lightness, the Europa was designed around a simple stamped-steel backbone with a T crossmember at the front and a Y-shaped split in the rear. An independent coil-over suspension on all wheels and a fiberglass body brought the Europa Series 1 off the production line at just 1,350 pounds.

The first driveline was a 1.5-liter Renault engine rated at 82 horsepower for the Europeans and a different 80-hp Renault engine for America starting in 1969. The engine was mated to its design-partner transaxle, a 4-speed manual unit designed to drive the front wheels of the Renault 16. Lotus rotated the engine and transaxle to drive the rear wheels and put the engine just behind the driver’s compartment.

The first Europas recorded 0–60-mph times in the mid-nine-second range. The Series 2 Europa was the first to be officially exported to America (and the first to be sold at home in the U.K.). Zero-to-60-mph times were about 9.6 seconds for that version.

In 1971, Lotus switched to the Lotus-Ford Twin Cam engine, rated at 113 horsepower in the American export version, and a 5-speed transmission followed in 1973. The Twin-Cam Europa brought the 0–60-mph time down to the mid-six-second range.

That body, though

The bodywork has always been the controversial point about the Europa. In a sense, the form followed the function, which has always been a Lotus hallmark. With the mid-engine design — and perhaps a touch of Raul Julia’s famous “What’s-a behind me is not important” driving attitude from the “Gumball Rally” movie — the rear window is just four inches tall and the peripheral rear views are blocked by aerodynamic fins slicing back from the roof.

Lotus addressed that a little bit by cutting down the “sails,” as they were called, but there was only so much good that was going to do. The real issue with the body is maintenance. The fiberglass bodies of the Series 1 cars were glued to the steel backbone. Series 2-and-later cars bolted the body in place, which is better for repair today. The backbones tend to rust, as any steel stamping from that era is prone to do. Specifically, the stamped-sheet-metal frame often fractures at the junction of the backbone and front crossmember. You can fix it, but you have to remove the entire body to gain access to it.

Another failure point is the door hinges. The doors are long and heavy, and put a lot of stress on the body. .

This is a particular problem because Americans like to use the doors to lift themselves out of any low car. And, well, none of us are getting any younger, right? 

The bottom line on the Europa body is easy: Just take a look at the car. Do you think it’s bizarre and ugly, or do you see the most elegant shooting-brake design ever conceived and executed in the history of the automobile? There’s your answer.

So, why buy a Europa?

The one thing every Europa owner will tell you is that driving one is a special experience. Brilliant handling made Lotus a legendary sports-car maker, and the Europa is a prime example of that virtue.

“Living with a Europa is a series of small compromises offset by that driving experience,” Stone said. “Its handling borders on telepathic, so good that only a hack driver could get one out of shape.”

But another reason to choose a Europa is affordability.

“These cars spent years drifting down to the bottom of the sports-car food chain, until much of the Europa production was relegated to back porches, under oak trees or hiding under tattered tarps,” Boone said. “There was a point, roughly a decade ago, when a needy runner could be purchased for under $10,000, with project cars going for a few grand to just-take-it-away prices. Today good ones are being marketed in the low-$20,000 range, and exceptional ones have gone for half again that much.”

A drive into SCM’s Platinum Auction Database shows that it’s still quite possible to obtain a good Lotus Europa Twin Cam for less than $20,000 (SCM# 6922167). With only 9,230 Europa examples ever made, that’s an attractive ticket price to gain entry into an exclusive fraternity. ♦