Remember when Lotus revealed that stunning, all electric, Lotus Evija on the world back in July 2019? It seems the response was so fantastic, that they’ve decided to go all-in on electric vehicles.
Speaking with Auto Express in the UK, CEO of Lotus, Phil Popham, said they will skip hybrid technology and go fully electric.
“One thing we do believe in is the future of battery electric vehicles, and our intention is to offer BEV on our products in future.
BEV is really well suited to sports cars – the torque characteristics, the weight distribution, design and flexibility of dynamics. For me it all leads to BEV as the ultimate technology for sports cars.”
CEO of Lotus, Phil Popham
With a new petrol-powered vehicle in development, they’ll finish off that project and ship the car in 2021, but new vehicle development will be completely dedicated to EVs.
As someone who recently announced I was only interested in covering EVs, I’m so glad to see automakers like Lotus, arriving at the same conclusion, electric is the future of transportation. Investing in further middleware (read: hybrids) is needlessly complex and misses many of the benefits a fully electric vehicle has to offer.
In the article from Auto Express, Popham expressed that have the capacity to place the batteries where you like, offers the ability to distribute the weight across the chasis as you’d please, rather than avoiding legacy components.
As we know, an electric vehicle has substantially fewer components than a combustion vehicle, dramatically simplifying the supply chain and assembly.
It seems like Lotus will attempt to build an EV platform that will enable them to build multiple EVs on a single platform. Economically this makes sense and they’re also able to leverage the work from parent company Geely, who already have an EV on the market.
The Emgrand EV from Chinese-based Geely, doesn’t ship into Australia, which is why you’ve likely never heard of them. The top model includes a 62kWh battery which is good for 500km of NEDC rated driving.
More at Auto Express, via The Driven.
Good to hear! Much less maintenance and cheap fuel, instant response
If they completely bit the bullet and went for in wheel motors as well would give them total flexibility in design. They have carried out research in this area for Protean an in wheel electric motor manufacture.