Noble M500 vs Lotus Emira: are old school sportscars better?

The Toyota-sourced V6 in the back of the extruded and bonded aluminium chassis is supercharged, produces 400bhp and 310lb ft of torque – which is good – and it weighs... 1,457kg. Which is ‘lightweight’ in the same way that most things are these days, which is to say ‘relatively’. A tonne of feathers still weighs a tonne. It also costs £96,500 basic, £115k as specced here. Feels like a lot.

Photography: Mark Riccioni

Not as much as the Noble, mind. The M500 drops a niche manufacturing hammer at £180,000 as standard, with the price rising depending on the largely limitless spec. The car here has the ‘CarbonSport’ package which includes CFRP front splitter, rear deck, fuel filler area and rear diffuser plus some other bits, which is even more.

Broadly twice the price of the Lotus. But it gets a steel spaceframe with GRP body based largely on the more intense M600 and 541bhp/595lb ft courtesy of a Ford Raptor’s turbo V6 lurking in the back. In heaviest trim it weighs 1,310kg, nearly 150kg less than the Emira. It’s faster to 62mph as you might expect (3.6 plays 4.3secs) but slower top end, with the Emira managing 180mph all out, and the M500 ‘only’ managing 173mph with full lungs thanks to shorter gearing.

They are intellectually similar cars. But they are not the same.

Warming up through some of the best roads in Wales, the sun lapping gently at the shores of the morning, the Lotus feels mature. The cabin is a sporty mix of digital and analogue, a bit fussy but useable. It feels like a big manufacturer car, with enough quality to make the price tag seem just about worth it, the suspension firm but not overly taut in Sport mode, precise without the clarity of some Lotuses. Basically it doesn’t so much breathe over bumps as ingest them, but it’s confident and solid, and much faster than the engine might have you believe. Mainly because the supercharged V6 feels lightly anaemic.

You can hear the supercharger, but it’s more mosquito than Mad Max belt whine, the power and torque arriving in a strangely bloodless, linear shove to a redline up near 7,000rpm. It’s fast enough, right sized and good fun on the famous complexity and surfacing of the roads around Blaenau Ffestiniog, but somehow lacking character. Grit. Edge. The six-speed manual is brilliantly short, but for some reason likes to balk second and third when it feels like it – two gears that you really use out here. It looks great in the violent green of this test car, surfacing more resolved than the Noble, but on the road it’s missing the bit that makes the grin more than just wry.

The Noble, on the other hand, is feral. On purpose. Faced with customers who felt the M600 was just the wrong side of Reaper in the passenger seat, the M500 is supposed to be friendlier, more useable, a bit less lethal if you do something that requires extra attention. Like breathing. But on small roads going relatively quickly, the M500 still feels like it’s going to be extremely disappointed with you if you don’t pay it attention. There is no ABS. There are precisely no airbags. No modes, the traction control is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ and it is just literal traction control not stability control; it only works if the wheels are under power, so if you lift mid corner, you’re getting lift-off oversteer in a mid-engined car on tight roads. I know this because of... reasons.

But the Noble purpose is something retrograde in these times of computer aided risk and reward: analogue input and reaction. A deliciously binary attitude in a world full of pointless veins of increasingly fractal functionality. What you see is what you get, and the balance of the car is managed not by pseudo AI, but by the interplay of hands, feet and ego. It’s a bit silly, but it’s fun.

The one thing you notice more than anything else in the Noble is the slightly vicious torque that arrives without much preamble, bursting through from roughly 2,500rpm like a geyser. The induction noise sounds like a fountain too, the turbos ingesting and exhaling air as fast as possible, the feeling of energy, of pressure and work, easy quantifiable. You get to know the texture of the boost from an engine that’s more used to hauling a 2.5 tonne pickup around.

It’s over quite quickly – you’re past max bhp at 5,200rpm – but that just means you row harder on the six-speed Graziano manual, surfing the torque and using a gear higher than the Emira. And that’s a ’box that saw duty in the open-gated Audi R8 and Lamborghini Gallardo, which means it’s a pleasure rather than a chore. And the steel brakes might be ABS-less, but there’s a tonne of feel and, in the dry at least, I only stop the front tyres dead during experimentation. Soon though, it’s obvious that these two cars are probably a bit antisocial for the road, so it’s time for somewhere we can let loose a little: Trac Môn. Anglesey Circuit awaits.

Hot laps in a Lotus. And it feels better, to be honest. More room to really stretch the motor – still a bit lengthy in the delivery rather than aggressive boost, even for a mechanically driven blower – but it starts to sound much more sonorous, reveals great steering, cracking body control and good feel. It leans into a corner a little, but rather than feeling like a lack of spring, it starts to telegraph what’s going on with the car. Plus the Track Mode seems to free everything up a bit more and pull back the mask.

And yes, push it too far into the corkscrew downhill section and it’ll understeer, but it’s a conversation rather than an argument with the wheel. Interestingly, oversteer really isn’t a problem unless deliberately provoked, and it’s not that different with the traction control off. It’s actually a really solid car for a circuit, but one suspects it’d become familiar very quickly.

Still, watching deputy editor Kew throw it around Anglesey with the North Sea flashing metallic grey in the sunshine behind it, it looks proper. Better detailing and surfacing than the Noble, more resolved, almost more... professional. It’s a nice looking thing.

Er... the Noble. How to describe? Standing in the pitlane, there’s a lot going on. Encrusted with shadows and sticky out bits, styling fortified in odd places by... more styling. Especially at the back. There’s a Frankensteinien way about it if you’re a car person. The vague feeling that you recognise elements stitched together in a new way. And your mind will have reached the right conclusion even if your eyes flatter to deceive. The headlights are Corvette. The tail-lights from a Citroen Picasso. There are shades of psuedo-Chiron in the rear three quarters and vents and stalks and bits of Ford on the interior that aren’t even related to the Raptor V6 nestled in the belly of the beast.

The funny thing is, the M500 looks great from certain angles, fussy from others, lacking that overall, hard to quantify flair that makes an interesting car a pretty one. It looks like a supercar, but not a stone cold classic. But honestly, who cares? If it works, it’s a clever use of proven mechanicals.

Some of it, in this first production/slight prototype car, doesn’t. Mild yoga to get in and out, motorsport displays stacked in a dash that’s been Alcantara’d to death with slightly wavy contrast stitching. A few garnishes of sealant in weird places, and a dash vent and engine cover that have an odd habit of abandoning their moorings during hard acceleration. Hmm. But the exposed gate on the manual is centred, the pedals are in the right places and the engine is straining hard with its own potential. So it’s game on, foot down and hold the bloody hell on.

The Noble is almost the Lotus’ opposite: scathing torque, short rev range, much attention to the gearstick. The engine huffing and twittering like a steam train in an aviary, not a song so much as a raw-throated shout. You approach a corner with the usual assessment of braking distances and timing, only to have it all blown to abstracts when you go a little too hard on the middle pedal and lock the front wheels. No ABS. Which I remember about half a second too late. Bleed out the brakes to get the fronts unstuck, then back on. Sail lightly past the apex like a forgetful galleon... turn late. Do this twice in the same two corners, much to the amusement of passenger Kew, who simply vomits up laughter that sounds one part amused to two parts terrified. But these inputs of information get coded into the next lap. Easier on the brakes, earlier to the apex. Feed, don’t force.

You might be largely on your own in the M500, but that’s the point. It’s more difficult, more serrated dynamically than the Lotus, but the work is worth the effort. The surprise is that the Noble abides. It might be pointy and unsympathetic, but you get the same balance and call and response from every corner – no modes or intelligence other than your own steering the ship. This is good. This is fun. Not easy or sophisticated, mind, that’s a different thing. But the M500 creates a giggly, half-formed psychosis. You find yourself grinning like you’ve spun a mental bearing, laughing quietly when you think you won’t be heard.

Even The Stig, once we’d downloaded its track data, liked the Noble’s balance, attitude and adjustability, and thought the Lotus wasn’t as fast as it could be. Mind you, that’s the impression Stig gives for pretty much everything. And yes, on a short circuit, the Noble was a couple of seconds faster. But we knew that.

A day of learning later, and bluntly, I’m not a fan of the Lotus. It’s a car that feels lost in other people’s noise, a good car rather than a great one, without any particular USP that would make you really, honestly desire one. It’s nice, but at £100k it’s too much money for not enough thrill. Interestingly, when the Emira was first mooted, it was a £70–75k car. For that, I could make a better case for it. But as it is, there’s too much talent out there both new and lightly secondhand for it to manage much more than a respectful nod.

Price is also the Noble M500’s problem. Because for £180k it’s an expensive outsider, without the fit and finish necessary for that kind of money. Porsche won’t be worried. But if money weren’t a consideration, I’d drive the Noble home. Not as a daily – despite this being the ‘friendly’ Noble, it’s only just about housetrained when you’re pressing on – but as a car to challenge myself with, on road or track.

Avoiding the usual tropes of being labelled a Luddite, there’s a scary joy in a lack of ADAS, collision avoidance, driver inattention bongs and driving modes. In a really nice manual gearbox. In learning a car so that you can get the best from it, and having it respond in a reliable – if slightly toothy – way. 

Thing is, either of these would bring a smile to your face on a sunny day on a good road in Wales, simply because they still offer some of the things that more zeitgeisty cars can’t replicate; connection, simplicity, and fun. Old school driver’s cars really can be magic. Which means we should appreciate them now, before they pull the biggest trick of all and disappear completely.

Noble M500

• Price: £180,000
• Engine: 3.5-litre turbo V6, 541bhp @ 5,200rpm, 595lb ft @ 4,550rpm
• Transmission: 6spd manual, RWD
• Performance: 0–62mph in 3.6secs (tbc), 173mph
• Economy: 32mpg (tbc), tbc CO₂
• Weight: 1,285kg–1,310kg

Lotus Emira

• Price: £96,500
• Engine: 3.5-litre supercharged V6,400bhp @ 6,800rpm, 310lb ft @ 3,500rpm
• Transmission: 6spd manual, RWD
• Performance: 0–62mph in 4.3secs, 180mph
• Economy: 25mpg, 258g/km CO₂
• Weight: 1,457kg