This 600-horsepower, 373-mile EV boasts a light show worthy of Knight Rider’s KITT and is the first production car with retractable lidar for self-driving.
PHOTOGRAPH: LOTUS CARS
SUVs don’t often get called beautiful. Rugged, cool, maybe even stylish on occasion. Marketing departments like to pepper SUV launches with adjectives that tap into our primordial instincts to haul stuff or ram through forest roads, but the typical Range Rover, Toyota RAV4, or Volvo has long since left its utilitarian roots behind. Looks, as opposed to actual ability, are increasingly important with SUVs. Looks are also entirely subjective, but we’ll go ahead and say it: Inside and out, the Eletre is a beautiful SUV.
SUVs are entirely new to Lotus. Even long after Bentley and Porsche brushed aside tradition and released their own first SUVs, Lotus remained a sports-car-only company. With SUVs becoming the dominant passenger vehicle type, it may have been inevitable that Lotus would eventually throw its hat into the ring. As might be expected, Lotus brought a lot of its old sports car tricks into the design and manufacturing of the Eletre.
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Lotus claims that 95 percent of the car’s functionality can be accessed by three or fewer taps on the centrally mounted, 15.1-inch OLED touchscreen. Information can also be projected onto the windscreen via a heads-up display so the driver doesn’t have to take their gaze off the road. Between the two rear seats, there’s a 9-inch touchscreen with a wireless device charging tray underneath.
Hennessey Garage 
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