29 Aug 06
Many of you contemplating a more environmentally-friendly attitude for your motoring will already be resigned to the future not only being more green, but more dull, too. Reducing CO2 emissions has never come high on anyone's list of ways of improving fun behind the wheel. Until now.
Lotus, long time masters of emerging technologies, sees no such conflict between the need to clean up its exhausts and the desire of its customers to enjoy themselves. In fact, it sees these aims as entirely complementary, and it has even built a car to prove this. Welcome, then the Lotus Exige 265E. Not only is it the quickest and most fun car Lotus has ever produced, it is, by some margin, the greenest as well.
Its secret lies in the fuel it drinks, which is just 15 per cent petrol and 85 per cent bio-ethanol. If you're a rev-head, the beauty of bio-ethanol is that it has a much higher effective octane rating than pump petrol, about 106 opposed to 95 or 97 octane. Simply put, this means a bigger bang in the combustion chamber and more power as a result. And for the more ecologically-conscious among you, bio-ethanol derives from crops such as cereals, sugar beet, sugar cane and even wood, so it is infinitely renewable. Best of all, while bio-ethanol's CO2 emissions are actually slightly higher than those of petrol, once you subtract the CO2 taken out of the atmosphere as the harvest grows, net CO2 emissions are reduced. In the case of this Exige, that's by up to an astounding 70 per cent.
