Part 1: The prosecution
Colin Chapman must be rotating faster than the impeller wheel of an Essex Esprit Turbo. Can this car really come from the company once ruled by his famous ‘simplify, then add lightness’ dictum? A car that weighs more than the heaviest, longest, stretchiest Mercedes-Maybach S-Class and which can be ordered with four LIDAR units, 18 radars and 12 cameras? A car built in China, a car with four doors, four-wheel drive and four levels of regenerative braking? In what possible way, then, is this a Lotus?
A Lotus is not just light, it is simple and clever too. Look at the one that sold a multiple of times more units than any other – the Elise. At launch it weighed 725kg, had an aluminium structure literally held together by glue and aluminium brakes too. And very little else. Light, simple, clever. And by Lotus standards, wildly successful. That, then, is the formula and it would be hard to imagine a car that strayed further from it than the Emeya, were it not for the fact that the company already has, with the Eletre SUV.
There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, that distinguishes the Emeya as a Lotus when you drive it. It’s massively fast, never a primary target for Lotus road cars, and while it deploys brain-melting technology to ensure it can slow and then bludgeon its way through corners at impressive pace too, the fingertip feel and balance that were once the hallmarks of all that was good about a true Lotus is laughably absent. Drive it fast, drive it slow, drive it as if your life depended on being as far away as quickly as humanly possible and it will leave you unmoved.
