Out of touch

‘You are not playing a game, you are driving a car,’ said Simon Clare, Lotus marketing boss at the recent launch of the Emira. As well as being the last Lotus with a petrol engine, the Emira is also the first with a touchscreen and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), and you can tell how awkwardly that sits with this normally driver-focused firm – Lotus wants its drivers’ eyes on the road, not buggering around with apps on a touchscreen…

Even Gavan Kershaw, the company’s legendary chassis set-up guru, is uncharacteristically lost for words when it comes to how he might manage a smart lane-keeping system, for example. ‘Erm, it should be like you are sitting with someone who can drive,’ he says.

As to the business of switching that smart steering system off (actually it only imparts torque to the steering; you can override it with a bit of brute force and ignorance), he shrugs: ‘where there’s a will there’s a way.’