Lotus Eme ya

FIRST DRIVE British brand's electric grand tourer is so good it's going to give the Porsche Taycan Turbo a real headache

- Alex Ingram

THE Lotus Emeya 900 Sport Carbon is three times the car the Lotus Elise S2 ever was. Literally. With the former weighing 2.65 tonnes, it'd take three of Hethel's mid-engined sports cars to come close to balancing the Emeya on some sort of giant automotive see-saw, and you'd still need about 100 litres of petrol to fully finish the job.

From a marque whose founder coined the mantra “simplify and add lightness”, that kerbweight stings abit. We're not sure the carbon-fibre housings for the rear-view cameras would have done much to help Colin Chapman warm to the idea, either, when mirrors work just fine and aren’t as complicated.

But we are willing to concede that making a direct comparison to a lightweight sports car is alittle glib, because while they’re the first thing that springs to mind when we hear the name Lotus, it isn’t the first time that the brand has gone alittle off-piste with a high-performance five-seat GT car. Who can ever forget the Lotus Carlton?

To that end, the Emeya really lives up to its ancestor, because as with the Carlton, it’s one of the most powerful four-doors (or five-doors, given that the Emeya is technically a hatchback) of its era. There's no big twin-turbo V6 engine on this occasion, though; instead, the Emeya has a pair of electric motors - one for each axle - and they combine to offer up an eye-opening 905bhp. If we continue using the S2 Elise as a unit of measure, that’s roughly seven-and-a-half 1.8-litre K Series engines. The newcomer’s torque nearly reaches four figures as well, at 985Nm.