A new era for Lotus. Our review of the Eletre Prototype is right here 👇
globally in just five years’ time. Now we’ve driven the first of these, in prototype form, with a trip to the spiffy new Eletre factory in Wuhan giving the chance to experience what could be fairly described as the most atypical Lotus to this point.
This definitely isn’t any attempt at a definitive verdict. Lotus’s Wuhan factory has a 3km test track, featuring a kilometre-long straight and then a series of corners, mostly very tight. Although one way, it is too narrow to be considered anything close to being a real race track.
While Lotus sports cars have often had to make a virtue out of the sparseness of their interiors, the Eletre is plush, flamboyant and packed with kit. This surely has to be the first Lotus with a massage function, or actively cooled seats. Oh, and tweakable LED mood lighting. The steering wheel has been squared off top and bottom for no obvious reason; it’s not like anyone is going to struggle to fit beneath it, which doesn’t feel very ‘For The Drivers’.
Air suspension and adaptive dampers are standard, and even on the ultra-smooth track the basic suspension setting felt obviously soft in the way the Eletre S’s nose lifted under acceleration. The cars in Wuhan also had pretty much a full set of the Eletre’s dynamic features: 48-volt anti-roll, torque vectoring, active rear steering and a variable ratio steering rack – some of which will be optional on the lesser European models.
There is an excuse. The tight track is designed for use at gentler speeds, marathons rather than sprints, and the air temperature is a sweaty, humid 35 degrees on the day of my drive. The combination of big load and temperature has been overheating the hard-working tyres and spiking pressures. A reminder that while active systems might be able to disguise the laws of Newtonian physics, they can’t break them.
Fortunately, the Eletre’s brakes bite hard, too. Even on the standard steel discs the R hauled the speed off without drama, and they dealt with big thermal loadings from the many corners well, too. The pedal feels firm and natural, and regenerative and friction braking is blended pretty much invisibly. The Eletre does have variable regen levels, selected by a paddle next to the steering wheel, but even in the strongest setting the regen isn’t very aggressive.
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