In our previous article about the Lotus Type 132, we said that Geely used Clive Chapman to present the reveal date for the car and also to excuse the company for making an electric SUV. We also mentioned that this vehicle would need a name started with E. We just didn’t think it would be so obvious: Lotus Eletre.
The company revealed the name by releasing a new video on its YouTube channel on March 27. The reveal date avoids any suspicion that this may be a different vehicle from the Type 132: March 29 at 19:30 BST. It’s exactly the same one Lotus had previously disclosed for the electric SUV.
Lotus will be a brand dedicated to electric cars. The Emira was already announced as the final product from the brand to present a combustion engine. That means the Eletre is just the first of all future electric vehicles produced by Lotus.
After the Eletre, Lotus will present a four-door coupe in 2023: the Type 133. True to its need of having high-volume sale vehicles in its stablemate, Lotus will show a smaller electric SUV in 2024: the Type 134. The company’s last vehicle – the Type 135 – will be an electric sports car. It is expected to arrive in 2025.
We get it that the Hethel company wanted to make it clear that its first SUV was electric with the name Eletre. At the same time, knowing its three following vehicles will also use a battery pack and motors makes us fear for their names: Eletri, Eletro, and Eletru? We hope the company is more original with its following choices.
Patent images that surfaced at the beginning of March already showed us what the electric SUV would look like. We also know it will be built over the SEA (Sustainable Experience Architecture), which could give us a good idea about its technical specifications. If they are anything like those that the first SEA vehicle presents, the Lotus Eletre will have a 100-kWh battery pack, two electric motors (one per axle) delivering 536 hp and 566 pound-feet, a 0 to 100 kph (62 mph) acceleration time of 3.8 seconds and charging times of 10% to 80% of capacity in less than 30 minutes.
On March 29, we still need to confirm that, as well as the dimensions the Eletre will have. Learning how much it will cost and where it will be sold should also be in the program, even if Lotus may decide to talk about that a while later.
With the presentation in London, we suspect Europe and China will be the first markets. Despite that, the lesson the Porsche Cayenne left was that the U.S. was an essential piece of the strategy involving an SUV that die-hard fans still repute as a heresy. There’s no reason for that to be different with the Lotus Eletre.
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