Lotus breaks out of sports sector

Lotus has announced details of what it claims is the world’s first all-electric Hyper-SUV with the customer deliveries of the vehicle set to start rolling out next year

The five-door Lotus Eletre is the marque’s first foray outside of the sports car market and draws inspiration from some of the qualities found on the sporty Emira and the electric Evija hypercar.

It has a range of about 600km, the four-wheel-drive’s battery offers 100kWh and at least 600hp, while intelligent driving technologies include “the world’s first deployable Light Detection and Ranging [LIDAR] system in a production car”. 

The Eletre is based on Lotus’ new electric premium architecture, which uses aluminium and high tensile steel for structural rigidity, and its design was led by a team in the UK and it will be manufactured at the company’s production facility in Wuhan, China.

It is on sale now across global markets and customer deliveries will start in China, the UK and Europe before being available to other countries. 

Features of the new model include that every element of the Eletre can be controlled digitally, although certain key controls are duplicated with analogue switches. Voice control through advanced speech recognition technology is also available.

Many of the car’s intelligent advanced driver assistance systems are also designed to be futureproofed so new features can be enabled via over-the-air updates. 

The SUV also comes with four drive modes, which adjust the steering, damper settings, powertrain and accelerator pedal response, and are standard on all versions of the car.