Driving 4,000 Miles in Lotus' New EV Was Brutal and I Loved It

The Lotus Electra is one of the most accomplished electric suvs. Money can buy this roughly $130,000 EV packs. Killer good looks impressive range and luxury touches all round. But can I love it? Like Lotus cars of old? Well, I've got thousands of miles on a mammoth electric European road trip to find out. I'm driving the Lotus Electra from my home in Edinburgh down the UK across France and into Barcelona before winding my way back home through Spain and France. This immense Odyssey will see me tackle endless highway miles, snowbound mountain roads, busy city centers and nightmarishly narrow village alleyways across the 4000 miles of my trip. I'll learn a lot about the Electra from how to balance performance with range, how to live with the car's quirks. And ultimately, whether the hyper modern Electra matches up with my dreams of driving lotus cars of bygone years. This is actually the first lotus that I have driven and that's a bit of a shame because as a child, I used to adore them. I remember my neighbor had a yellow spree from about 1990 I was obsessed with it. When I say neighbor, they actually lived several streets away from me, but I was so besotted with this car that I would quite often walk around just so I can stare at it. But the times have changed since then and Lotus has moved on back when I was an obsessive fan. Lotus was known for its exceptionally small and lightweight sports cars. Dear, Le de Spree, dear Lamb. They all weighed about as much as an iphone and we all bolted together by some folks in Norfolk Motor. Today is somewhat different. It's still got a headquarter in Norfolk where it was originally from, but it's now owned by Chinese automotive giant Geely and the Electra is built in China, not Norfolk. And this car is also a huge departure from what we know from Lotus. While its two seater sports cars were barely actually big enough to get two people in a toll, the comfortably seats for people. And I've got so much space in that boot for all of my luggage and all of my filming equipment on this trip. Then there's all the tech on board, the liar, the autonomous driving, the adjustable air suspension that makes the car go up and down the massive screens in the front and in the back. It's all very not lotus, but that is the point of the electorate. It's not the lotus of old. It's the lotus of today. I set off from my home in Edinburgh. With a full charge and made my first leg to London with just a couple of easy charging stops before heading to the Euro tunnel on England's South Coast there. I carefully drove the car onto the train that would take me under the sea. Emerging. 40 minutes later in France, the electric s comes with 100 and 12 kilowatt battery which boasts a maximum of 355 miles of range per charge. Based on the more generous WLTP testing on paper, that's a lot of mileage, but that maximum range is based on slower city driving. Whereas the vast majority of my driving was at less efficient highway speeds as a result, my range was consistently far lower than the quoted maximum. So although I haven't been suffering from the classic range anxiety, I definitely have felt that I needed to really keep an eye every step of the way it's such a comfortable car to just be it. I mean, these seats for one thing very snugly on the old buttocks. And I think maybe the comfort is one of the things that has perhaps taken me by surprise because early lotus cars weren't really built with comfort in mines. They were basically tin boxes with an engine. You know, if you wanted luxury, you go for a big lumbering rolls, Royce, but you want something small and nippy that you can take on country roads. It's a lotus. I'm not knowing much about this car, the Electra before I got it. I kind of expected that things like luxury and padding and stitching and feel would be sort of afterthoughts, but that's not the case at all. It's clearly been designed very much as an all encompassing luxury vehicle. So you can go fast but you'll actually be comfortable while you do it. And to be honest that on a trip, like this is the dream time for acceleration. Hm. Mm. Oh, I do like it. Ah, that wasn't even in sport mode that's in to, but it's still God, it goes, I think it's just so surprising for a car which is this big and heavy. You expect it to feel quite lumbering. So you're trying to drive a cathedral and actually it doesn't feel that at all. It feels nimble, it feels quick, it feels like it wants to be driven like an old lotus now. No, road trip is complete without road snacks. So I bought a massive bag of pick and mix like a massive bag. I mean, it might not look that massive now, but let me tell you, it was a massive bag. There's just not that much left. Road snacks. Gotta keep your sugar levels up and it's gotta be something that you can just grab, shove your hand into and put into your face. There's no point trying to eat a steak or a roast dinner or a casserole while you're driving. So, don't even try as I made my way further south, the only issues I hit were the storms and the driving rain on the highway. Although that was quickly replaced with clear blue skies as I got closer to Barcelona. But what I now had to worry about was tackling city center congestion. When I read the reviews of this car before I got it, all of them pointed out how insanely massive it is and I was expecting this truck to arrive and while it is big, there's no question, it is a big car. It just doesn't feel that big when you're actually driving it in the busy center of Barcelona. However, the car suddenly felt much, much bigger. I winced with stress. Every time a scooter or tiny city car would whiz past me within an inch of scraping the expensive paintwork. As I tried to navigate the city's complex one way system. Eventually I got to the garage. I booked and parked the car while I attended the mobile World Congress press conference. At the end of the week long show. I picked it up and simply repeated the journey back out of Barcelona this time heading northwest further into Spain. I've been planning my route in two different ways. One of course, Google Maps on my phone, I put in a uh vague destination of where I wanna go and then see what route it spits out. Then number two using the shell recharge app. Now, this is how I've done all of my recharging on this journey. The app not only shows all the compatible charges that I can use along my route, but also allows me to filter specifically for the fast chargers. And of course, on a journey of this length, using fast chargers is absolutely critical because I'm trying to do about 78 hours of driving per day. And if I had to stop and recharge for several hours on that trip, then I'm not gonna get anywhere. The shell recharge app also allows me to pay for the charging and activate the charging through the app. Annoyingly, despite it being 2024 most chargers don't just let you use your contactless credit card, but at least by using the app, I can pay through that and it's fine. But my first charging point in Spain wouldn't allow me to initialize charging either with the recharge app or the provider's own poorly rated app. Even after entering my credit card details multiple times, there was simply no way to use the charger. And so I had to find another. I used the Electra's built in sat nav to find an alternative, desperately counting the miles as they ticked by and my range dropped. But the charger I was directed to simply didn't work with no power going to it whatsoever with precious little range remaining. I was forced to find yet another charger mercifully, this one did work, but it only offered slower speeds. So I had to wait for a while, while it charged. But it wasn't the only time this happened for me, I've used the system to reroute myself to a charging point that when I get there, it's just completely out of order. And one of them I actually think was brand new and hadn't yet been activated. It was still in its bubble wrap after it happened twice. I opted never to use it again because I just couldn't take the risk of being routed to charging point, needing to charge but not being able to. And while the conversation around range anxiety, I definitely think is less these days simply because we've got so many more charges available and the cars themselves have so much more range, things like that, simple weird quirks that just haven't been thought through annoy me because they throw anxiety, they throw doubt and fear back into the mix almost at a point when we got over it. I made good time driving up through Spain, stopping off in a desert area where I simply had to shoot some video of the electra in the amazing stark rocky landscape. I continued north hopping between fast chargers when I could and then stopping at a slow charger behind a mcdonald's to give me just enough range to get to a faster charger 100 kilometers away while I'd left plenty of leeway to comfortably reach my destination. The route I'd chosen had other ideas. As I left the town and climbed higher into the hills, the pouring rain turned to blizzard, snow covering the roads and trees and getting thicker. With every minute I drove. As I climbed higher, the car had to plow through yet deeper snow on the road. And I became increasingly concerned. Google Maps suggested the route simply continued through the hills, but I had no idea whether the road climbed higher and might become more dangerous or if the worst might already be behind me. While I was confident that the Electra as a large heavy vehicle would be well equipped to handle some snow. I had no idea how well it would potentially handle much more treacherous conditions. The problem was, I'd use a lot of the car's power getting even this far continuing on this road felt too dangerous, but turning around meant backtracking a long way to that same slow charger in the mcdonald's parking lot. I eventually found a different slow charger tucked away in a hillside village that required a slightly shorter detour. Although the sat nav decided to take me through the heart of it down steep cobbled streets so narrow. I worried I'd been inadvertently directed down footpaths rather than roads. These tight alleyways set the car's parking sensor screaming on all sides as I inched my way through. It's amazing how big the car felt when I was convinced I was going to gouge big holes in its sides still. I eventually found the charger and waited long enough only to get me to the fast ion charging back. But even that didn't work out as expected. My new problem is that I'm at an iony 350 kilowatt fast charger there. It is behind all the rain. Uh And yet, despite that, although it originally charged it something like 300 kilometers an hour, it's now dropped to 80 it's just staying there and it's gonna take four hours to recharge the car. And I don't have that kind of time. I don't know whose fault this was lotuses or ions, but I resigned myself to charging for just an hour before hopping on to yet another bank of ion fast chargers nearer to my overnight destination of Bilbao on the northern coast of Spain. Thankfully, this charger worked perfectly over the next few days, I headed for home driving first to the French coastal resort of Biarritz to take in the stormy seaside conditions before snaking my way further northeast along mile after mile of rural French highways and byways for most of the motorway miles. I am using the autonomous driving now, this isn't fully taking control of the car, but it is doing the acceleration. So my legs are back up here and it will automatically adjust my speed if it sees a car in front. But it has got Lidar on the top when you activate it, then a Lidar system raises out of the roof and that scans the road in front. So what that actually means is that it is looking at the road markings and will keep the car in line on the road. So that does mean that right now the car is driving itself. I'm not doing any steering. I am not using the pedals, it's doing its own thing. But legally, I do still need to keep my hands on the wheel. I need to be paying attention to the road. I can't just sit back and play on my phone. So while it's not fully autonomous, it's offering enough support to make these long motorway miles. Absolutely fly by. The availability of fast chargers meant my route back was pretty uneventful, especially as the constant driving rain meant I didn't bother with any sightseeing detours. Instead, I just hunkered down and followed my route home across France. The great thing about doing toll booths in France in an English car is that you cannot reach over. So every single time I stop at one of these, I've got to stop park up under my belt and get out. I ok. And then I get back in wallet, back in belt, back on to drive and off. We go and then I'll just repeat that 20 or 30 times. Of course, that would just be much easier if I was traveling with another person. Eventually, a Calais boarded the Eurotunnel train and emerged back in England. A further 10 hours the following day took me from London back home to Edinburgh. The journey was an absolute mission and while parts of it felt like a grueling slog, I was still impressed with how easy the electra made those long stretches of highway driving. The three weeks and thousands of miles I did with the car allowed me to get to know it well and I had truly loved driving It rarely have I been in cars that strike such a balance between luxury and performance and I adore its look, which manages to appear both aggressively sporty yet also sleek and refined. I love its elongated aerodynamic swooping form. That to me makes it look more like it's been crafted not just in a wind tunnel but by a wind tunnel. The other problems I've had have been fairly minor, but they do just rear their head a little bit too often. I it's got Lidar in order to do autonomous driving and 98 percent of the time that works absolutely fine. Then other times I'll be cruising along the highway at whatever speed I'd set it at and then suddenly it will just slam on the brakes but only briefly dropping me by 20 kilometers an hour with a sudden jolt. It does that for absolutely no reason that I could understand. I've also had the actual whole SAT NAV system just crash out on me about three times. And that's terrifying. When I'm driving through a city center needing these directions and then all of a sudden they're not there and I can't pull over in order to put my route back in. But I won't lie. There is a small part of me that quite likes it. Lotus has typically been a company that's had a bit of a reputation for leaving things a little unfinished. There is the old joke of Lotus is an acronym, meaning lots of trouble, usually serious, but it was sort of forgiven because the cars were basically cobbled together by a small team based in essentially a big shed in England. So buying a Lotus meant buying into that and knowing that you weren't necessarily gonna get the type of finesse that you might have expected from a massive German car maker. So there is part of me that kind of sees these little quirks these little things that should have been polished up before the car was put on sale. That's almost a family resemblance going back to earlier generations over 3000 miles later. And I have absolutely fallen in love with this thing and I am gonna be gutted when Lotus takes it back off me. It is a pleasure to drive. It's got looks to kill for and its long range and fast charging means it is an absolutely superb long distance cruiser. But is it the lotus that I dreamt of as a child? Well, I can say with honesty that, no, it's not. It's better. This is the lotus that I dream of as an adult.