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Should Lotus be building an electric car? Or a full-EV? Well the facts are that if it doesn't, it won't survive. And the British brand has spent too much of its seventy year history barely surviving. Time for something different: time for this, the Lotus Eletre. With this performance SUV, the British brand reinvents itself as an electric performance car maker, in the process leap-frogging rivals Ferrari and Aston Martin, both yet to take that final step. Several other uber-fast Lotus EVs are set to follow, including the Evija hypercar. It's all a far cry from the Lotus of just a few years ago, a cottage British brand hand-building lightweight little sports cars for the few that wanted them. The company's acquisition by Chinese giant Geely in 2017 changed all that. Now, Lotus is so well funded that its boss Matt Hindle has been poached from Tesla and it has a dedicated Lotus Technology Centre in Coventry 'for the creation of lifestyle cars', of which the Eletre was the first. Impressively, instead of merely borrowing a platform from fellow Geely brands Volvo and Polestar, Lotus has created its own, the 'Electric Premium Architecture'. And manufacturing (alongside this model's similarly-engineered Emeya GT Fastback stablemate) takes place at the Geely plant in Wuhan, China which will eventually be putting out up to 50,000 examples of this car a year. A whole new world for Lotus then. Would you want to be a part of it? Read on.
If Lotus as it was had somehow created a six-figure luxury electric SUV, we can't imagine it would have been much like this. But this is now a very different brand - and as you can tell by just looking at an Eletre, this is a very different kind of Lotus, developed with the kind of technology that prior to the Geely take-over, the company could only dream about. We'd hoped that some elements of its handling would be more Lotus-like, but that was probably expecting too much from a car weighed down by such a hefty battery and saddled with such enormous hopes from its Chinese investor. Having said that though, it's a more engaging steer than any of its direct rivals, its frantically fast, interestingly designed and (unlike Lotus models of the past) is beautifully appointed and almost faultlessly built. Enough perhaps then to draw in those who've enjoyed the idea of a Lotus from afar but never been able to justify owning one. And perhaps more importantly, to open up the way for a new kind of customer - someone who wants a cool, futuristic kind of sporting brand. Is that what this company now is? The Eletre makes a good case for it.
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