PRODUCTION of the world’s most powerful series production road car is drawing ever-closer, as work draws to a close on the factory that will build the Lotus Evija, writes William Scholes.
The factory is beside Lotus’s 2.2-mile test track at Hethel in Norfolk.
The first of up to 130 customer cars are due to reach their owners in the summer.
The Evija is possibly the most outrageous of all of the all-electric hypercars to be announced so far.
With a nice round metric 2,000PS - or 1,973bhp in old money - being targeted, the Evija will be stupid-fast.
A top speed of more than 200mph is a given, but it is the acceleration of cars like this that really takes the breath away: 0-62mph in less than three seconds is brisk enough, but how about 0-186mph in under nine seconds?
Providing you have a beefy enough charger, Lotus says you can even fully charge the battery in less than 10 minutes. Presumably anyone wealthy enough to buy one of these cars in the first place won’t have difficulty arranging the necessary infrastructure...
The battery’s power output is a mad 2,000kW, and the range is up to 250 miles - though not, one imagines, if you lean too hard on the car’s acceleration capabilities.
The name, by the way, is said to mean ‘the first in existence’.
And the price of all this? More than £1.7 million… It’s a far cry from a Lotus Seven or Elise.
