You settle into the recumbent, straight-legged posture you would expect of a grand tourer behind the suede-trimmed steering wheel of the Eletre. The roofline doesn’t extend far above your head, but you do have a raised vantage point of the world outside.
The car’s primary and top-level secondary controls and displays are a little unconventional but quite well thought out. A slim strip of digital instrument display sits behind the steering wheel, conveying a sensibly chosen selection of information (and it extends across the dash, in front of the passenger, to relay relevant information there too). But behind it is a usefully large head-up display and to the driver’s left a 15.1in landscape-oriented touchscreen display.
For regenerative braking and driving mode controls, you use the cleverly split shift paddles: the one on the left to toggle trailing-throttle regen up and down and the one on the right to cycle up and down modes.
Before much longer, you will begin to realise where Lotus has spent so much of its development budget. The material quality level – the way its cabin is presented and finished – is really ambitious. It both looks and feels genuinely lavish and luxurious enough to stand comparison with any rival you like: BYD, BMW, even Bentley. The door speakers are works of sculptural artistry; its cupholders are upholstered and engineered with slowly rising, damped recesses. There hardly seems a single fixture or fitting that hasn’t had serious money spent on it, all ready to convince a new kind of customer that a Lotus can be a world-class luxury car.
The boot is usefully long and wide. It could swallow a lot of luggage, although it’s shallower than those of other big SUVs, and may be less likely to accommodate really bulky cargo as a result. If you go for individual rear chairs (as our test car had), you don’t get folding second-row seatbacks, which hits outright carrying versatility.
Passenger space within that second row itself is predictably generous, and occupants are well provided with innovative storage areas and a touchscreen console of their own. Outright passenger comfort is limited by the car’s high cabin floor, however, and by the slightly thin, mean-feeling padding of the seat cushions.
Multimedia system
The Eletre’s 15.1in touchscreen infotainment screen seems slightly suspiciously over-designed. It has several attractive backgrounds, looks very neat and responds quickly, but it’s not as easy to use as it might be, with slightly fiddly small shortcut icons and a menu structure that requires a little too much to and fro not to be a distraction while driving.
There’s no direct ADAS menu shortcut, for example. Neither is there a north-up display mode for the factory sat-nav that gives you proper control of zoom mapping scale. And said sat-nav tends to plot routes taking in charging stops that you haven’t asked it to set.
Wireless smartphone mirroring eases the pain on that score, but it isn’t integrated especially well, so you can’t hop between Apple CarPlay and the native software seamlessly.
