The Lotus Eletre R
Photography by Jake Hoare
The Lotus Eletre is enormous, vast, and that there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s kind of taken the sports SUV and put it on a course of aggressive body sculpting and fine arts. A bit of history, Lotus has traditionally been known as the car that makes light cars that handle fabulously well. Synonymous with the name Colin Chapman, the brilliant English automotive engineer from England who put out his first car in 1948, and then marched on to Formula One delivering decades of scintillating performance. This heritage with beautifully chosen names like Elan and Elise – Lotus loves an E name. If Lotuses were one thing, they were light. This is definitely not light, but somehow it’s still definitely a Lotus. It’s a sports car with lashings of luxury—a weekend circuit racer that spent six months with a personal trainer.
The interior of this Lotus Eletre is simply jaw-dropping. Stunning details and refinement really show up just about every other luxury carmaker. You have to start listing some extraordinary names like Pagani before you can find something that approaches this level of gorgeousness. Metal controls on the steering wheel and throughout the cabin mesh with the sophisticated light strip that doubles as ventilation. The small flat-bottom racing-style steering wheel, with achingly beautiful detailing, reminds you this is a Lotus. All the never-before-seen KEF speakers, detailed and sintered gold, and stamped metal mesh continue the theme. Look carefully at the Lotus logo, and there is a subtle, rounded triangle integrated into the curves of the interior and even the key or the pebble as they call it.
The heads-up display is very comprehensive and the home for almost all driving functions, and the driver’s instruments have become a subtle, beautiful, thin strip located under the ventilation light bar. This is mirrored on the passenger side, giving them an understanding of what’s going on. Where do you even start with the materials? Surfaces I haven’t seen before, like the woven wood integrated into the door. The seats themselves are sculptural with a carbon gold trim. Lotus want to remind you that anything they want to do, they can do it beautifully. The back seat and the back passenger area are so vast they almost need an address, cleverly matching the front yet stripped back in simplicity in terms of controls. Of course, it doesn’t go without, and the functional screen provides independent ventilation assistance, not to mention entertainment options. I’m sure passengers could play with this all day until the driver uses the master controls to turn it off.
There’s more than a few hints that this is a Lotus and a driver’s car. For instance, zero shiny driver surfaces because of the use of leather and Alcantara not only makes the interior safe from light strike but also a pleasant place to be because sound was controlled by the soft surface. The entire interior is beautiful; it is not flashy—it is a hand-stitched English suit. It is a work of art blending form and function in an excruciatingly beautiful way. And we haven’t yet got onto the single most impressive feature, the enormous skylight glass roof that will turn opaque at the touch of a button. Control it with the touch screen or voice command, and you can go from perfect view to perfect privacy in a moment. Light in color, it doesn’t overheat in the sun. The central screen is one of the best I’ve seen, with a responsiveness that puts others in the shade. The word is that the graphics are run on the Unreal game engine, and it features a pixel-perfect rendition of your exact car in its state, such as doors open, roof transparent or opaque, etc. A good number of controls are broken out into physical switchgear, and combined with the voice commands, it works well. In a vehicle that’s trying to do so many things, like extraordinary performance and a beautiful interior, you can’t have controls for everything. It would look like the cockpit of an F35. And while I might like that, probably most would not, and it’s not what you’re looking for in an ultra-luxury car. Ventilation is broken out, and that’s the biggest bugbear. It has its own controls plus always-on screen digital controls.
The steering wheel has everything you need for the drive while keeping you focused on just driving. It’s a good balance. Adjustable brake regeneration is an excellent and natural feeling. You don’t feel like someone is occasionally putting on a bunch of rubber bands to slow you down; it just feels like you want it to. From ‘Coast’ all the way up to to max – it never feels artificial, always natural. It just feels like you’re driving a high-compression naturally aspirated vehicle in all the best ways.
The exterior styling is very good in that it combines clear form and function, doing what it needs to do—communicating that it’s a Lotus and a performance car, even though it’s the size of the entire Lotus factory. Active aero is subtly hidden away in the nose behind the vast front splitter and not so subtly hidden away with the massive active wing at the back of the car that moves swathes of carbon fiber around to ensure you’re balancing grip and aero. Seeing the faces of children in the other cars around me as the wing deployed is something quite special, so I’m pleased they’ve given you both auto and manual control. It’s when you’re on the outside that you can see that there are many bits of special hiding away, like the comprehensive LIDAR suite that tracks everything around you, especially pedestrians, to show you where the danger points might be. Overall electronics seem flawless, which is a real achievement for a legacy English company.
On the other side of the wheel, you have a choice of drive modes. The driver’s instrument indicator tells you which one you’re on. Cruise control, volume, channel, media, speech, and favorite are all available at the touch of a button. Now, one of the drive modes is off-road, accompanied by a very nice animation on the main screen. While I’m sure it’s capable, I just did not want to take this car off-road because I wanted to protect its sculptural beauty. But with multi-ride height air suspension, I’m sure it’s capable. Will someone do this for me and report back, please?
While you are aware of the size of the vehicle, once you are up and running, you wouldn’t guess that it’s about the weight of two typical Lotuses. It gets around in a way that I can only describe as pleasing and responsive. With 675 Kw it’s outrageously fast, doing 100 kilometers an hour in just 2.95 with a top speed of 265. Unlike some electric vehicles, this is not a one-trick pony. It actually handles well. With gobs of electric instant torque, progression is never a question, and that lulls you into treating it like a one-time sports car, and most of the time, it performs like one.
I’m driving in West Auckland to experience windy roads, the sealed road ends abruptly, and while the SUV in front of me carries on, I do not. The Lotus would get me there, but I want to keep this in perfect condition. Caution is maintained. I turn around and seek another road where I try to confuse the four-wheel drive by overpowering on corner exit, but I just can’t fool it. Where you are never power-limited, you can actually test things like steering under all conditions. The steering without a hint of understeer on windy roads tells me that very clever software control is happening. Combine with the air suspension : There’s no body roll. The application of the throttle in sports mode is explosive. The body has a very strong feeling. In sport mode, the suspension is fun, forgiving, but with feedback. It’s a good combination. I suspect some mapping has been done to make the response feel like a race car rather than a EV, and it’s appreciated. It makes the drivability much higher.
The mechanical grip of the car seemed to be fabulous. Now, it’s a little bit hard to tell with something so large and with so many devices to ensure you are kept safe. However, my experience on roads wet and dry, good surfaces and bad—but not gravel because it’s just too pretty, although I’m sure it would be fine.. When a car has 23 inch rims with 275/35s on the front and 315/30 rims on the back, means the front tires on this car are bigger than the back tires on most anything. Yet it didn’t feel overshod; no deadness that too much rubber brings to some vehicles, just extraordinary grip, whether you are accelerating, cornering, or under braking. Literally nothing I did from a driving perspective could upset the stability or handling of the car. And I didn’t even touch track mode.
It actually gets better as you drive it. The only thing that I didn’t love was my luggage in the vast storage space. What? A boot? A trunk on a Lotus? Enough space to fit an entire 1960s Lotus. You could probably pitch a tent in there as well. The thing is so enormous that my suitcase slid around like a hockey puck on an ice rink. A visit to the gas station sorted me out with some stretchy tie-downs – but no gas for this all electric monster with a reported range of up to 450k.
I don’t really know how Lotus has achieved this car. I would have thought that with years of small car experience, if they came up with a big car idea, they would have thrown it in the bin. But they clearly didn’t; they put it in the filing cabinet, and all of that knowledge is now summed up into something that defies belief. If this is an indication of what is to come, then I’m very excited about the future of Lotus. We know them for innovation, but normally that means drilling a hole in something to make it lighter. With this, it’s drilling a hole in the market, opening a new segment, and not tentatively either.
Lotus purists won’t necessarily see this as a car for them, but it might do something even better. I think this car opens a new set of fans. You don’t go out looking for an Emira and end up buying an Eletre, but you might go out looking for a hyper-car SUV and end up buying an Eletre. There is very little in this segment really. It’s a different class that’s highly desirable, melding together mind-bending hypercar performance, sculptural beauty, and vast size.
If this was a movie, you’d call it genre blending. If it was a meal, you’d call it fusion, but it’s not. It’s a car, and it’s its own thing. And I love it. The great thing is the Lotus essence seems to have been retained. It does things in a way the light car might, just with more traction and, quite frankly, more speed. More luxury, more comfort. More of everything. Maybe that’s a way to sum up this car. It’s not a Lotus; it’s two Lotuses. No, I know. Come on, it’s not a 900-kilogram Elise. If you want one of those, get one. A huge amount of fun, this is a huge amount of everything. As you can fit the Elise in the trunk.