Lotus is adamant big, heavy EVs will still be fun to drive

The company that brought you the Elise, the Elan, the Seven and countless other lightweight hall-of-famers over the decades is tracking towards a future in which it sells almost nothing that weighs less than two tonnes. Cuts deep, doesn’t it?

The Eletre tips the scales at 2,490kg and the Emeya won’t be much lighter; the Emira is 1,440kg, but its electric replacement is already looming large. Who knows how portly the new D-seg SUV will be when it enters the fray in 2026.

And okay, the Evija is a 1,680kg greyhound by comparison. But have you got £2.4 million in the bank to buy one? We’ve given the TG Magic 8 Ball a shake and it’s telling us ‘Outlook not so good’.

Until battery technology gets much, much lighter - and that’s assuming it ever does - it’s increasingly hard to see space for lightweight stuff in the electric vehicle universe. Sub-tonne Dacia Spring aside, perhaps. The days of ‘Simplify, and add lightness’ are gone, aren’t they?

“They're gone if people want to tick every box,” counters Gavan Kershaw, the man responsible for how the new breed of EV Lotuses will feel from the driver’s seat. “So if you want 400km of range, AC/DC charging, 800 volts, heated this, massage seats that… it's the customer that drives the effective weight.

“When we launched the Elise S1, it was just over 700 kilos. Everybody loved it. But within six months of ownership, they went ‘The roof’s pretty rubbish. And it'd be nice if the brakes actually had a servo on them. And if it had electric windows. And the heater’s rubbish’. So ownership experience and useability drove the weight up even in that car.”

Fast forward nearly 30 years and a new car will barely get a look in if it doesn’t connect to a person’s phone, so imagine trying to sell the idea of a 150-mile EV track toy with no real-world use that also costs a fortune. Yep, you get the Evija.

Kershaw points out that a Formula E car is super fast and weighs less than a tonne, but getting all of those compromises into a sports car is a non-starter for now. If it were a Venn diagram, all of the circles would be several miles apart and protected by perimeter fencing and armed sentries.

“Cars now are so universally adaptive to all situations that you wanna jump in it and drive across Europe to a track day at Castle Combe,” says Kershaw. “Those things you can get in one package now.”

We get it. Lotus has had to make its peace with the very demanding, very heavy world it finds itself in. But surely Kershaw must be longing for the day where a 300-mile battery weighs the same as a good old tank o’ fuel?

“Yeah! Jesus, we’re Lotus,” he agrees. “If a battery was 50 kilos and we could get the same range out of it, it’s the one that would be in a Lotus. We use the lightest technologies that we can.”

He explains that during a car’s development, Lotus sets a target weight for every single component and if any of them exceed it, the department responsible is hauled up to provide what he unnervingly calls “a real explanation”. Gulp. Then it’s a case of working out if the excess can be saved elsewhere, and balancing material use against cost.

“Some of the cars that failed have had carbon fibre tubs, but they've been in the wrong segment. And that balance brings volume as well. We weren't a sustainable business when we were selling five or 600 sports cars a year, but we were super lightweight and all the rest of it with no features.

“That's what I think we've got right at the moment. We've got a three car garage now; a four car garage if you're wealthy enough to have an Evija. That's never been said with Lotus before.”

It’s a bit like Porsche and the Cayenne; Lamborghini and the Urus; Ferrari and the Purosangue. All cars that help fund the stuff we get excited about. But for Lotus, it’s more existential. If it had kept making limited-edition-of-the-week Evoras it’d be a distant memory by now.

Can Kershaw at least promise that these big, heavy EVs will be fun? “100 per cent,” he says, without missing a beat. “We’ve got four tyres on a car, and how you control them is how fun you can make it.

“With electric, you want bandwidth in the car. So it wants to feel agile at 50kph, but also safe and confident at 300. We use systems to defy physics: you can effectively get a car to roll into a corner now with arc systems and rollbar control, damping control. Under braking you can stiffen up the front axle when it sees a brake pressure, so it doesn't pitch so much.

“All of those technologies just aid us as dynamics engineers. So actually it’s making our life… not easier, but ever-changing, and we can give the car a character at all speeds. Then you link drive modes with that, and the world's your oyster.”