The truth is, the way the Eletre gets itself down the road isn’t quite as impressive as what it’s like to simply inhabit, and doesn’t feel like what, or how, it’s been made to win you over. But it’s impressive all the same.
Despite all of Lotus’s preamble about ‘lightness of feel’, there are no dynamic conjuring tricks or revelations here. The Eletre is just a better-riding luxury car than the SQ8; a little less well isolated, sure, but more settled, supple and compliant on the road, more enveloping, and more dynamically versatile.
We tested the car in standard form, without the active anti-roll bars and four-wheel steering that comes as standard on the pricier Eletre R, or which can be had as an option elsewhere. With both fitted, there may be a little more keenness about the car’s handling character.
Even so, quite contrary to what Lotus would have you believe, I’d say you feel every inch and kilo of the car’s sheer heft.
That neither makes it especially hard to drive is tribute to Lotus’s careful dynamic tuning, though. It steers through a very intuitive-feeling rack that’s neither tacitly direct nor light and slow, and it contains its body movements consistently well without feeling overly firm or reactive to bumps – but it rides them with fluency (assuming you have dialled up the appropriate driving mode).
There is actually, surprisingly and refreshingly, little sporting pretension about the Eletre. It’s got decent levels of grip and enough body control and balance to use as much of its 603bhp as the margins of the road you are on might allow. But, most of all, this feels like a big car with quite a long wheelbase and which isn’t especially agile as an unsurprising result. It’s also a car that leans on its outside front contact patch quite hard before engaging any of the others to help it around a corner, and it never arcs and rotates like a Porsche Cayenne.
Or even like an Audi SQ8 E-tron Sportback. The Audi’s three-motor layout, its more modest dimensions and its slightly higher levels of grip make it feel unmistakably tauter-controlled, and keener to turn, than the Lotus, and they also allow it to come out of bends more quickly – when you are feeling brave enough.
