Testing, testing

This week we've given you 10 pages on the incredible Lotus Evija hypercar. Road test number 5763. That should be my new PIN number, because I will certainly never forget it.

- MATT SAUNDERS

Never before, not in 15 years in this job, have I felt high-speed acceleration like it. Never have I needed to have a word with myself in order to simply keep my right foot pinned - all the way to infinity and beyond. I'm not sure Dirk Benedict had that problem when launched out of his mothership in Battlestar Galactica. Either way, the experience must have felt fairly similar.

Here, though, I would like to talk about asymmetrical torque vectoring. I've lost days of my life dreaming about it, but what would it actually mean?

The Evija has four-wheel independent torque vectoring - and what is, I now appreciate, a pretty well-realised system - but it doesn't do any of the trick 'spin on the spot' stuff. Not that I mind. This car has taught me the size of the notional gap between the dynamic potential of this technology and the reality faced by those who just have to make it work.

The problem is that unless you're going to fit any car that happens to have four independent electric motors with as many independent accelerator pedals (go on, wiggle that fourth toe), controlling those motors at times when you would rather they weren't so independent is always going to be a challenge. And that, by the way, is a lot of the time.