COMPLICATE THEN ADD WEIGHT

Love it or loathe it, Lotus's new electric SUV will help keep the firm's balance books in the green. But is it a Lotus in anything but name?

- TOM FORD 

It's raining in Norway. Not a gentle patter, either, more a deluge wrapped in a downpour, the sweet smell of petrichor swamped by the sheer volume of water hosing out of the sky. The forest holds a gloomy edge, sweating myth and looking like a thousand dark bedtime stories, suspicious, soggy huddles of spruce and alder plotting with the Norwegian pines. And yet the roads are good. Incredible, even. Two lanes of scarred tarmac that shift and loop through the landscape following the contours of the lakes, rising and falling like a breath. Apart from the disconcerting drag of the pools of standing water, driving doesn't get much better than this - a Lotus doing what it was born to do - attack an interesting, twisty road with vim, engaging and fun.

Except that this isn't your usual Lotus. It's 2.5 tonnes of electric SUV wearing a Lotus badge, potentially a sheep in wolf's clothing, big and yellow enough to look like someone chipped off a shard of sun and plonked it down on a road somewhere outside Oslo. Recalibration is needed. This is the Lotus Eletre. It is not what we're used to.

Of course, according to the court of public opinion, the Lotus Eletre should not exist. Mainly because it's not a sports car. Worse than that, it's an SUV, is electric and tech heavy, and produced in Wuhan, China instead of in the UK in Hethel, Norfolk. It is therefore, according to some sections of the intellectual bin fire that is social media, the antichrist with 22-inch wheels.

But ignore all that for a second. Because the Eletre may be a big, fat electric SUV that has as much to do with traditional Lotus values as a canoe has to a cruise ship, but it still somehow has Lotus in there somewhere. Maybe it's the steering - direct, chatty, quick.