Lotus Evija review

With this much firepower at your command, it’s best to ease into things. A combustion engine may be conspicuously absent but the Evija still immediately floods your senses.

There are five drive modes on this thing, and escalating amounts of power and driver connection. Range is likely to become the default for reasons we’ll get into later, but it’s also the one in which the car feels most inauthentic. It’s wrong to talk in terms of throttle feel – the right pedal is more accurately in charge of torque demand – but it feels a bit sludgey in Range, like your foot is pushing through porridge.

City is sharper, Tour better still, but it’s impossible to resist trying Sport as soon as a straight bit of road presents itself. Now there’s 1,257lb ft of torque to experiment with, an unholy amount of energy, and enough to send the car warping forward in a manner that makes an F1 car look like a Kia Picanto.

It’s an unusual sensation and an impressive single digit in the face of physics, but requires both self-restraint and a strong stomach: 0-62mph is done in less than three seconds but it’s the rate of acceleration and the way it sustains beyond that’s most bewildering. Better to save that sort of high performance extroversion for the track.

How does it handle?

It’s deeply impressive. OK, so the Evija doesn’t move like an Elise, but nor does it feel like an Elise with a hippo strapped to its roof. It uses an 800 volt architecture, there are two motors within each electric drive unit on the front and rear axles, and two gearboxes. So all four wheels are driven independently, for an algorithmic dynamic bandwidth to blow the mind.

Marshalling this amount of power is a ferocious challenge and the software mostly – mostly – makes a decent fist of it. Remember, the parameters are set by the four bits of rubber on the corners of the car (bespoke Pirelli Trofeo Rs).  

It sounds like it should be intimidating. Is it?

The Evija is unavoidably bigger and heavier than anything Chapman and co ever envisaged but crucially still feels like a Lotus. Actually, it’s close to the McLaren 750S in terms of steering feel and linearity of response. The Mac is TG’s reigning Speed Week champion, so this is high praise. The Evija’s steering is, like the McLaren’s, also electro-hydraulic rather than fully electric, and there’s no regen on the braking, the big Lotus relying instead on carbon ceramics supplied by Brembo.

It settles into a remarkable rhythm, the hydraulically operated, retractable rear wing and DRS finessing the aero and stabilising everything. There’s a welcome purity to its responses, and despite the gargantuan forces at work here it will slide – at lower speeds anyway – progressively.

It’s not exactly supple in terms of ride quality, and as ever with a carbon body you’re aware of certain frequencies and buzzes. But it’s comfortable enough and a nose lift means that speed bumps present no hazard. We’d give width restrictors a wide berth, though.

Is it seamless?

Inevitably, there are caveats. There’s a slight pause before the Evija unleashes all 1,600bhp that’s available in Sport mode – the EV equivalent of turbo lag, perhaps – a gathering of thoughts as a zillion lines of code zoom around the mainframe. It’s swiftly forgotten once you’re at full tilt, but it should be instantaneous. The Rimac and Pininfarina are both sledgehammers by comparison.

What about the noise? Is there any?

Lotus has worked hard to imbue this awesome looking machine with the character, sensation and vibrations we take for granted in a combustion-engined supercar. With mixed results, it has to be said. The Evija’s EDUs – electronic drive units – emit an organic whine, deliberately unfiltered. There’s no synthetic sci-fi fakery here.

It’s a noise you don’t notice so much on the track because you’re focused on reeling in some spectacularly big numbers – and on not crashing. But in regular use and at motorway speeds it’s a different matter, not least because the noise is naggingly insistent at steady state cruising speeds. Throttle off and it disappears. Get back on it and it’s right there again.

More soundproofing might be the order of the day, unless you have a thing for the sound made by a dentist’s drill. It’s more interesting sonically as you decelerate from higher speeds, when your ears are treated to a quasi jet engine whir.

Any other issues?

We’re obliged to record the fact that the Evija suffered various software glitches during our time with it, and more than once needed the equivalent of a hard reset, i.e. an IT Crowd-style ‘have you tried turning it off and on again?’ Apparently the Evija dislikes being left in Sport mode in urban scenarios, which seems unlikely. We know it’s a complicated beast but this feels like… unfinished business.