Lotus unveiled its latest upcoming model, the Lotus Eletre at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. This Lotus is an SUV. In Hungarian, ‘Eletre’ stands for ‘coming to life’ and this car certainly signifies a rebirth of the historic British brand from a company manufacturing 2-seater sports cars to making 4-seater SUVs and marks the road ahead for the company as an electric performance car firm.
Interestingly, Lotus Eletre would have no real competitor in the market as Lamborghini Urus which it closely matches in dimensions is petrol-powered. While Ferrari Purosangue will be a hybrid. In fact, with the same dimensions, the design of the Eletre confers the car more room inside. The Eletre is just 2cm shorter than Mercedes EQS SUV.
Lotus Eletre: Design and specifications
Eletre uses an all-new platform created by Lotus than adapting any from the pre-existing Geely hardware. The investment seems justified when we consider that the aluminum architecture, which the company calls the Electric Premium Architecture (EPA) can be adopted to models that are smaller as well as larger than the Eletre. EPA is a skateboard-style design that is adaptable not only to models of different sizes but also to models that choose to employ different battery sizes, electric motors. component layouts and intelligent driving technologies.
Eletre would come in three iterations, varying in their performance and other specifications. All versions would be four-wheel drives. The car would achieve a top speed of 162mph and an under 3 seconds period for its 0 to 62mph race.
Now owned by Geely, the company’s natural priority would be the Chinese market. The second crucial market for the brand would be US and Lotus seems confident of an uptake later in mainland Europe and UK. Europe and UK. The Eletre would be manufactured at the new Lotus plant in Wuhan, China. When the car opens for sales at the start of 2023, it is expected to cost under 100,000.
