NEW WORLD ORDER

Audi is a past master of slick electric SUVs while Lotus is a class rookie. Can the new Eletre compete alongside the SQ8 E-tron? Matt Saunders decides

- Matt Saunders

For years - for decades, even there's nothing. You can trawl for as long as you like through Autocar's rather wonderful digital archive (see p39 for details): incidences of the Lotus and Audi brands - so distant from each other for so long, operating within market niches entirely discrete from one another - finding their way into competition in the same group test simply don't exist.

Then, in 2006, shots were fired: the Audi R8 appeared, and the following year it won our annual Britain's Best Driver's Car contest beating a Lotus 2-Eleven in the process. The Lotus Evora returned fire in 2009, winning the title outright and beating the V10-engined incarnation of the R8 back into joint fifth place.

From there on out, suddenly there are semiregular meetings: of Evoras and Elises coming up against R8s and TTs - some going Audi's way, others Lotus's. All the while, Audi was trying to convince everyone that it could be a sports car brand- and for some of that period it made an all right job of it. Now it has stopped - or at least taken a hiatus - and the tables have turned. Suddenly it's Lotus's turn to spread its wings, now under Chinese ownership, and seek to become something entirely new.

Whether you or I feel instinctively that Lotus has got a snowball's chance in hell of success - of becoming the broad-batted, multi-faceted, soonto-be-all-electric modern luxury-performance brand that it aims to be, rivalling Porsche, Mercedes-AMG, BMW M and God knows how many others - is likely to be a matter of, shall we say, 'interested conjecture'.

The point is this: Lotus is no longer that same company we think we know. After so many wilderness years, we need no longer debate any of the following: that Hethel's new plan is real, serious and now actually happening. The Lotus Eletre is here. And, my goodness, it's a whole heap of different.