Opinion: Progress isn’t the enemy for motoring enthusiasts

We’re to blame. Us. And by us I mean you and me: motoring enthusiasts. You may well have looked at the recently revealed Emira and wondered why the heck Lotus is building a replacement for the Elise that weighs more than 1400kg and can be specified with electric seats, radar cruise and space for golf bags. Let’s not forget that the original Elise weighed 725kg.

Lotus is right now fielding the same criticism Land Rover did with the Defender when it dragged that model into the here and now. Nobody bought the old Defender in its latter years. Or the Elise come to that, of which 16 examples were sold last year in Australia. And while you probably couldn’t envisage a market better suited to selling Land Rover Defenders, in its last full year on sale here, the Defender was roundly trounced in the sales charts by clanging wrong’uns like the Dodge Journey.

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You can unearth such cognitive biases everywhere you look. The Alpine A110 is a car of near-deity status, but it shifted seven units here last year, which means it outsold Morgan by one solitary car. A threadbare constituency of middle-aged men who enjoy dressing up as Mr Toad almost one-upped the might of Formula One’s Alpine. Having considered this issue for a while, I think it’s because our passion means that we can become fixated on the idea of something rather than the reality.

We love the notion of hosing out an old Defender but were we in the position to buy one it would fairly quickly become a peripheral concern. Likewise we lionise Lotus’ ideals of light weight while parroting Chapman tropes at length, but would an Elise be a better car if a six-footer could fit in it, there was space to charge a phone and the air-con and infotainment system worked? Through a purist lens, possibly not, but reality probably disagrees.

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When Mercedes-AMG launches the four-cylinder C63e hybrid, you’ll notice the cycle restart. In the same vein, many will choose to ignore the fact that the all-wheel drive BMW M135i sells better than the old rear-driver. The first full year of sales for Porsche’s four-cylinder 718 Boxster and Cayman was 19 per cent better than the last full year of the six-pot 981, and that was in a declining market for sports coupes.

Granted, to the likes of us, sales are anything but a perfect indicator of a car’s inherent worth but, to car manufacturers at least, runs on the board count for a lot more than our closeted marketplace of ideas and ephemera. We may be shouting our opinions into a private echo chamber of like-minded individuals but, in the background, development continues apace and it usually results in ever superior cars. We’ve never had it so good and yet we’ve never raged against the machine of progress quite so vociferously. Even now I feel an anxiety over how the Emira is received. I might go and hose out somebody’s car. It sounds wholly therapeutic.

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