LOTUS EVIJA
No pressure then. First things first, can a 1,600bhp electric prototype really handle like the cars of Lotus legend?
Welcome to TopGear’s 2021 Electric Awards, and the bar starts high with a drive of Hethel’s EV hypercar
Ihad heard that in the moments before your brain decides you’re going to die, time puts the brakes on. Fractions of a second melt into minutes, creating enough space to contemplate your futile existence and fully observe the unpleasant situation that’s unfolding. Well, it’s true, because I’ve just gone full Matrix. It started with a fizz, the unmistakable sound of rear tyres spinning up, has progressed to an angle not entirely parallel with the straight piece of track I’m supposed to be launching down, and I’m heading directly for a large puddle on which I will almost certainly aquaplane and probably end up somewhere in the Norfolk Broads. Upside down. On fire.
Turns out my brain is a total drama queen, because somehow I react, the car rights itself and I snap out of slo-mo mode pointing in the right direction. Safe, well, in one piece but with the sudden urge to hug my wife, children, cat, and an ashen-faced James Gough now murmuring and cradling his Sony FS7 in the passenger seat. In hindsight, doing a standing launch on a wet track in a totally passive prototype – no active aero, no traction control, no ESC, no torque vectoring, basic ABS – on Trofeo Rs probably wasn’t the best idea, but that’s the thing about the Lotus Evija: its unfathomable performance is so accessible and
exploitable that it lulls you into a false sense of security. That’s my excuse anyway, and I’m sticking to it.
A crash is never ideal, but especially not today as I’m at Lotus’ Hethel test track, the first person in the world to experience the Evija from behind the wheel, and half the workforce is watching from the pit wall... including the new boss Matt Windle. It’s an honour but also a responsibility, and the Evija’s raw numbers weigh heavy on my mind. In finished form the 130 examples will cost £2.4m each... for that you get four motors, four-wheel drive, 1,972bhp, 0–62mph in well under three seconds, 0–124mph in six seconds, and, perhaps most startling of all, it’ll go from 124mph to 186mph in a further three – half the time it takes a Bugatti Chiron. Today we’ve only got access to 1,600bhp, 1,250lb ft of torque and a top speed capped at 140mph... we’ll manage.
This isn’t just a halo car for Lotus, it’s a flagbearer for really fast electric cars as a whole. If Lotus can make this one stick then the supercar’s future is all but secure. It’ll also get the next phase of Lotus’ rejuvenation under the Geely umbrella off to the best possible start, and Windle’s plans are punchy: the new combustion-engined, Evija-inspired Emira sports car (formerly known as Type-131, think Evora replacement but more usable, priced between a 911 and a Cayman) is revealed in July. Built in a brand-new production facility (£100m has been invested in the Hethel site in just the last 18 months), Windle wants to take production from the current 1,500 cars a year to 5,000, and there’s capacity to make more if there’s demand. Beyond Emira, which will stick around “into the late Twenties” says Windle, Lotus will become a pure-electric carmaker. Work is already underway on a lightweight electric sports car platform – a joint venture with Alpine – and a Chinese-built electric SUV waits in the wings. The Evija isn’t just a one-off to demonstrate Lotus’ technical ability, then, it’s a signpost for the entire future of the company.
Speak to the people behind the project and it’s clear they’re well aware of the traditional electric car limitations – range, weight, emotion – but for every hurdle they see an engineering opportunity, and Lotus was never going to blindly follow the pack. Unlike the flat skateboard battery you’ll find in most mainstream EVs these days, or even the T-shaped pack in the Rimac C_2 and Pininfarina Battista, all the cells sit behind you in a pyramid-shaped pile. “We wanted the cockpit-forward feel of a Group C racer,” says Gavan Kershaw, the man responsible for
“IT’LL GO FROM 124MPH TO 186MPH IN HALF THE TIME IT TAKES A BUGATTI CHIRON”
making all Lotuses handle like Lotuses. “Plus you couldn’t sit this low, and the roof would have been 200mm higher.”
Engineers settled on a 718kg, 69kWh battery – less than a long-range VW ID.3, way behind the Rimac’s 120kWh pack and way, way behind the 200kWh slab Elon wants to put in the Tesla Roadster. A trade-off between being the lightest car in its class (1,680kg in its lightest spec, about the same as a new 911 Turbo), delivering a usable WLTP range of 215 miles and making sure you can get some decent track time in. Kershaw reckons about 15 laps or 30 miles flat out, before it’s time for a charge. “Don’t forget this is a car that can do 0–186mph in under nine seconds and accelerate at over 1g for all of that. You’d need to be an F1 driver to cope with any more track time,” he points out.
Even when it’s stationary, it’s lightning fast: “We can charge up to 500kW, although it’s not readily available at the moment.” That’s Louis Kerr, chief Evija platform engineer. “We can do 350kW easily, that takes about 12 minutes. With 500kW we’ll do it in sub-nine minutes for a full charge.” The cooling is purposefully overkill, too: “We have a lot of radiators, we’re over-cooled in road conditions so you can push it on track and won’t have any loss in power.”
What you feel right away is that low centre of gravity, officially lower than an Evora’s, but, unlike a skateboard chassis with the mass spread out towards all four corners, the Evija really wants to rotate, to change direction on a pinhead – a big benefit of concentrating all that mass in the middle of the car. “We liken it to someone in an office chair. Put their arms and legs out and try to rotate them, it takes a lot of effort,” Kershaw explains. “Get them to curl up into a ball and you can flick them from side to side.”
I honestly didn’t think it was possible for an electric car to feel like a Lotus, but it’s there, from the first corner, the DNA. It’s crude in here, no trim whatsoever – just a mass of wires and metal – but that’s helping me to concentrate on what’s important. The steering is superb – light and darty around the dead-ahead, then loading up according to wheel angle and speed. The brakes, Brembo’s top-shelf carbon-ceramics, baked to perfection for no less than nine months, deliver the goods too: loads of feel, easy to modulate and enough bite to shed the silly numbers I’m effortlessly accruing. For the less aggressive driving modes (there will be five, manettino-style on the steering wheel – Range, City, Tour, Sport and Track), most retardation will be regen, bleeding into physical friction as needed, but on track you’ll be in full control of pad on disc.
But it’s the way this thing moves that’s staggering. There’s so much less inertia than I thought, it doesn’t feel cumbersome, it’s light on its feet, playful and with the instant smash of acceleration even a naturally aspirated engine could only fantasise about. I have to keep reminding myself this is far from finished because the handling is already so polished. There’s a little body roll, which is welcome, but also a satisfying balance in the chassis, like it’s working all four tyres evenly.
There’s joy in simply controlling and managing the mass, feeling my way around the track; it’s miles from the point and squirt device I assumed it would be. And there’s still ESC, trick traction control with a hero sideways mode, four-wheel torque vectoring... and another 400bhp (400bhp!) to come. Right now, the torque split is locked at 25 front, 75 rear, which would explain its penchant for oversteer if you tickle the throttle a hair early in the corners, but mainly it just grips and rips, despite fairly modest 265-width front tyres.
Pin it from standing in the dry (no need for clever software, just mash the throttle, an idiot could do it) and it’s not so much the initial force that surprises you – Teslas and Taycans have conditioned us to that now – but the way that, with no gearchanges, it just keeps coming,
a wall of unrelenting shove. In fact, it actually ramps up, accelerating harder the faster you go, feeding in the hit of the whole fruit as and when the tyres can handle it, until you’re staring wide-eyed at some enormous number on the dash in front of you and wondering how on earth you got there. And it’s all so easy. Even a twin-clutch gearbox requires some management, some knowledge of when to shift, at what rpm the engine comes off the boil, but this is just a two-pedal go-kart, albeit one with a sizeable rocket up its bum. The noise? A shrill wail that intensifies exponentially – a good fit for the driving experience, to be fair – that’ll be dampened down once they fit sound deadening, pump something synthetic through the speakers and add an actual interior.
We’re shown a next-stage prototype, stripped down and up on jacks in factory three – the building where Evijas will be bolted together, the same building the VX220 and Lotus Carlton were built in – and take our chance to marvel at the components on show, the finest money can buy. A two-motor, two-inverter assembly that’d fit in a gym bag – 1,000bhp right there. A 12kg disc, one for each wheel – that’s the single-speed gearbox. A third F1-style heave damper, to keep the car level under extreme downforce. One of the world’s largest, single-piece carbon-fibre tubs with built in subframes for maximum stiffness. The list goes on.
And we haven’t even mentioned the way this thing looks yet. Yes, the Tron-style wrap, designed by us to form the perfect centrepiece for our glow-in-the-dark cover, is a work of considerable genius, but the basic shape is breathtaking. A harmony of soft, flowing curves and holes, rather than angles and aero add-ons, here’s proof that you can adhere to classic mid-engine proportions and still produce something titillating and different. It bodes well for the Emira.
Next steps? Some high-speed testing boxes need to be ticked at NardÒ once the world opens up a bit, but with a fair wind there’s a confidence first customers will have their cars late this year, possibly early next... and they’re in for a treat. I came prepared to be disappointed, to find a straight-line junkie in a pretty hat, but left convinced Lotus is on the brink of something special. I rode the lightning and now I want more.