2024 Lotus Eletre S review: This could be the best electric SUV ever
Sure, I’ll grant you, the idea of Lotus building an SUV – let alone one that weighs 2.6 tonnes because it’s powered by an enormous 111.9kWh battery and is fully electric – is very similar to the suggestion that Ed Sheeran might be the new guitarist for Metallica.
It sounds wrong. It feels wrong. Almost as wrong as the idea that Lotus is now a Chinese brand, owned by Geely, and that the SUV EV in question, the Eletre, hails from Wuhan, of all places.
But here’s the electric shocking thing, the Lotus Eletre – weighed down by a price almost as large as its dimensions – is one of the most impressive SUVs I’ve ever driven, regardless of motive force. It also looks and feels fabulous, inside and out, and will genuinely go 500km between charges, even if you drive it like a Lotus should be driven.
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Yes, absolutely, a whopping great family hauler with a Lotus badge isn’t just out of character for a brand built on the ethos that light weight is everything, it’s the antithesis of its character. It is Tony Abbott suggesting women are capable of leading countries, or Lleyton Hewitt giving up half way through the third set. And yet… and yet it really is a bloody good thing.
2024 Lotus Eletre S price and equipment
So let’s start with the bad thing – the price. To be fair, this Lotus Eletre feels like a worthy competitor for a high-end Audi Q8, and looks better than the Lamborghini Awful, sorry, Urus, which is built off that same platform.
So with those expensive titans in mind, here come the numbers. The Eletre starts at $189,990 for the base model, which does still offer 450kW, 710Nm and a zero to 100km/h blast of 4.5 seconds, which feels pretty dang fast in something weighing 2.6 tonnes.
The next step up, and the vehicle we tested, is the Eletre S, which boasts the same power, torque and speed, but carries more fruit and thus loses a bit of range, dropping from the base’s claimed 600km to 535km. It will set you back $229,990. The words “I could have a Porsche for that” hover into view at this point.
But you can go further, and faster, with the mad-sounding Eletre R, which offers 675kW, 985Nm and the ability to smash your way to 100km/h in 2.95 seconds, which, having been quite frightened enough by the Eletre S, sounds alarming.
Now, keep in mind that Lotus creator Colin Chapman famously defined the brand with a couple of sentences that have become lore – “Simplify, then add lightness,” and “adding power makes you faster on the straights, subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.”
The thing is, he could not have imagined what a new Lotus, owned by China’s Geely, would be able to achieve in corners, and everywhere else, thanks to the witch craft of electric engineering and clever air suspension.
But, as you would expect at this price point, the Eletre is about a lot more than just performance. It also looks stunning.
It’s the kind of car that makes Queenslanders – the kind who can non-ironically wear cowboy hats and drink XXXX Gold without making a face that suggests they’ve accidentally eaten cat food – very excited, because it’s just so interesting and intriguing to look at, inside and out. “What the fork is that?” was the most common question.
The Lotus Eletre S comes with 22-inch alloy wheels (20s or 21s are no-cost options, if you’d prefer more range instead of kerb appeal), air suspension, adjustable dampers, a head-up display, four-zone climate control, soft-close doors, powered and heated front seats, Matrix LED headlights, a powered tailgate, ambient lighting, wireless phone charger and a 23-speaker KEF sound system (no, I’d never heard of KEF either, apparently it’s a British stereo brand).
The Eletre R makes do with 15 speakers but gets rear-wheel steering and active anti-roll bars to make up for it.
A Type 2-to-Type 2 charging cable is included as well as a home trickle charger that can plug into household power points.
The AC charge rate is 22kW, or double most EVs, so if you have a 22kW three-phase charger at home you can get a full charge in under six hours.
For a 7.4kW wallboxes you’re looking at about 16 hours, or at full whack on a 350kW public DC charger (yep its rated to charghe at 350kW) you can get it from 10-80 per cent in about 22 minutes.
Your Eletre is also covered by a five-year/150,000km warranty, with the high-voltage battery scoring a separate eight-year/200,000km warranty that guarantees at least 70 per cent of the original capacity.
Inside you get lovely soft-touch feels, splashes of Alcantara and a whopping 15.1-inch central screen that displays the 360-degree camera, navigation and graphics for the various drive modes, as well as the most impressive-looking Apple CarPlay layout I’ve ever seen (it fits ALL of my favourite numbers).
The Eletre is rated to tow 2250kg
2024 Lotus Eletre S: What we think
I really didn’t think I would like the most non-Lotus-ish Lotus of all time, but I had so much fun trying to upset the Eletre, as I threw it at a twisting mountain climb, that I burned off 88km of its predicted range in just 42km, which made its 500km claim off a single recharge look absurd.
But then, on the drive back down a steep hill with lots of hard braking I recovered all that lost range and after 100km in total, some fast, some normal, I still had an indicated 400km to go.
Over the following weekend I drove around 220km to the Sunshine Coast and back and finished up with more than 200km of predicted range left. This was almost as impressive as the fact that Lotus has managed to make an electric SUV that weighs too much, defies everything that its brand stands for and not only doesn’t suck, but is a mighty fine machine.
It sits flat through corners, it rides beautifully, its double-glazed windows make it wonderfully quite inside, there’s no wind noise from the mirrors, it has many modes – one of them is Off Road, which is quite hilarious considering how soft and sporty its Pirelli P Zero tyres are – and most of them are quite good. Touring delivers what feels like plenty of power until you go into Sport, the air suspension drops you down to the road, the driver’s seat grips you tight and the whole Eletre gets very interesting, and involving, indeed.
I switched between this car and a much smaller ICE-powered Emira for an hour and what blew my mind was how similar the steering was between the two. The turn-in you get in a Lotus has always been one of the things that makes the brand so damn impressive, and track-friendly fun to drive, but somehow they have engineered that ability into, I say again, a 2.6-tonne SUV.
Despite that weight, there is less of the kind of pitch, roll and porpoising you get on other vehicles of this size.
And on top of all that performance fun, and Lotus-like ability to attack and enjoy a winding bit of road, it feels properly luxurious inside.
I wasn’t just surprised by how much I enjoyed the Eletre, I was close to dumbfounded.
And I was only driving the Eletre S. The Eletre R must be a ridiculous beast of a thing.
2024 Lotus Eletre S: Verdict
Score: 4/5
Nothing, but nothing, to come out of China can touch the Lotus Eletre, and plenty of vehicles from Europe would struggle to keep up with it. It’s that good.
2024 Lotus Eletre S price and specifications
Price: From $229,990
Basics: EV, 5 seats, 5 doors, SUV
Range: 490-535 (WLTP)
Battery capacity: 112kW
Battery warranty: 5 years/150,000km
Energy consumption: From 21.4kWh/100km
Motor: Twin, 450kW/710Nm
AC charging: 22kW, Type 2 plug
DC charging: 367kW, CCS combo plug
0-100km/h: 4.5 seconds
