Picture a sports car’s engine bay. What’s in there? An AMG V8? A BMW inline six? How about a retuned heart from a Toyota Avalon? It might sound crazy, but it’s the sort of formula Lotus has been employing for years. 

The Lotus Evora might not seem like it shares much with a Toyota Avalon, but it does

The Toyota Avalon has been gone for years now. But when the large sedan rolled off the line for the first time back in 2005, it brought to bear one of Toyota’s more groundbreaking V6 engines, the 3.5L 2GR-FE.

In the Avalon, the naturally aspirated mill produced around 268 horsepower. For the time, it was respectable. But in a 3,600-lb sedan, hardly a race car. Drop that mill into a 3,075-lb Lotus Evora and squeeze an additional eight horsepower out of it, and you have the makings of a rocket.

After all, Colin Chapman, speed freak and founder of Lotus, applied his “simplify and add lightness” mindset to everything he could. Now, it might seem wild that the company behind Jim Clark’s greatest wins and the James Bond movie-going Esprit would opt for a Toyota engine. But the brand has been doing it for years.

It wasn’t just the Evora and the Avalon sharing a ticker

The Lotus Evora used versions of the Avalon’s Toyota 2GR-FE for quite a tenure. 2009 to 2021, to be precise.

But the Evora and its 2GR-FE are only part of the Toyota-Lotus relationship. The first of Lotus’s performance cars to pack a retuned Toyota engine was the Elise 111R.

The ultra-light little Elise model used a version of the 2ZZ-GE, a growly little 1.8L four-cylinder mill developed by Toyota and Yamaha. Yeah, that Yamaha. Not a bad thing to have racing motorcycle DNA in your lightweight sports car.

Since the Elise and Evora, the Exige and Emira have also been equipped with Toyota engines. As wild as it sounds, the current production Lotus Emira still uses a 2GR-FE engine, now supercharged and producing 400 horsepower.