Wednesday, 12 August 2026. Another day, another car hiding in plain sight — welcome back to Cardle of the Day, our recurring series where we play through the daily puzzle at Cardle and then spend a few paragraphs celebrating whichever machine decided to make our morning difficult.
If you haven’t played Cardle before, the premise is beautifully simple: one car, five photo clues, each one a little less cropped than the last. You can guess at any point or skip ahead if the early frames leave you completely stumped. Get it right on clue one and you’re a genius. Get it on clue five and you’re, well, in good company today.
How it played out today
Today’s puzzle tried to be coy by showing lines that were clearly from a mid engined car. With the bright yellow colour, it’s almost like it was trying to send you to Maranello, but no. The other crops showed a few other important lines that led to a smaller, cheaper, but no less thrilling mid engined machine.
With enough of the car finally visible, the long, sculpted flanks and that distinctive shape came into focus. The answer was the amazing Lotus Emira.
Another one to the list
The Lotus Emira arrived in 2022 with a bang: the last petrol powered sports car Lotus intends to build. The company has since committed to an electric future, which means the Emira carries a weight of finality that most sports cars cannot imagine. It is, in a very real sense, the end of a chapter that stretches back many decades, all the way to the 1950s.
Built on a bonded aluminium chassis at Hethel in Norfolk, the Emira was offered with two very different engine options: a Toyota-sourced 3.5 litre supercharged V6 carried over from the Evora, and a turbocharged four cylinder AMG unit sourced from Mercedes-AMG. That combination of Japanese reliability and German forced induction sitting inside a British sports car works, regardless on your outlook.
The Emira is built at Lotus’s Hethel facility in Norfolk, on a site that has housed the company’s operations since 1966. It shares its bonded aluminium platform with the Evora, though extensively revised for the new car. The AMG-sourced 2.0 litre turbocharged four cylinder produces 360 bhp in First Edition specification, and I can attest to its dynamics and wooshy sounds.
Lotus spent decades building cars that prioritised feel over comfort, and feedback over refinement, sometimes to a fault. The Emira represented a deliberate shift toward a car that could actually live alongside modern rivals without asking for too many sacrifices. It has decent storage, a usable interior, and air conditioning that works. For Lotus, that is a bit of a novelty.
The fact that it also looks genuinely gorgeous in the right spec, with its low and wide stance means it photographs and films well, with supercar presence. All of these are reasons why this is yet another Cardle puzzle that I would not kick out of bed. See you tomorrow!
