EVs for petrolheads
PLUG & PLAY
A new generation of electric performance cars has arrived. Did they remember to pack the fun? You bet they did – bags of the stuff
High in the hills, snug in the Pininfarina’s speeding carbon monocoque, its Group C-style bubble screen full of Solar Yellow Lotus, my brain’s running way beyond its rev limiter (forgive the archaic reference). But for a moment, between oh-so-careful applications of the long-travel loud pedal (and it really is loud), I free up just enough mental capacity to consider the concept of exponentially accelerating change; flashes of profound progress separated by shorter and shorter intervals until, like strobing street lights playing across the shell of a flat-out Battista, those moments coalesce into aseamless streaming singularity.
Change certainly feels like it has its foot to the boards. Until the tail end of the last decade, Carrozzeria Pininfarina was an Italian design house and coachbuilder, not a car maker, and Lotus was a perennially cash-strapped sports-car marque synonymous with mesmerising handling, borrowed K-series engines and clever work with glue. If, in early 2019, you’d told me that in 2024 I’d be chasing an all-electric Lotus SUV in an engine-less Pininfarina in a surreal game of 2779bhp kiss chase, I’d have bought you abottle of water and called for medical assistance.
But here we are –for now, at least. But where, exactly? In the calm-ish before the storm, I’d suggest. Last time we gathered together the world’s most exciting electric cars, in May 2022, we learned two things: that the Porsche Taycan GTS was the best EV for petrolheads; and that there was still a long way to go. And soon we’ll see two pivotal performance EVs: Porsche’s electric Cayman/Boxster and Ferrari’s e-hypercar.
All of which means that right now we’re experiencing performance EV version 1.5; faster, more efficient, smarter. But genuinely thrilling? And alive with any of the delicacy, precision and facility for dynamic dialogue common to all the great piston-engined performance cars of the past? First impressions, garnered at the Nürburgring and the roads around it, would suggest rampant progress.
On a short dash between uphill hairpins the quad-motor Battista closes the gap to the Eletre R, huge torque effectively flattening the climb, working Cup tyres like so much pizza dough and heaving at my spleen. As impressive as the Pininfarina’s speed is the rate at which you learn to trust the car, its incomprehensible performance (0-62mph in 1.86 seconds – not long ago this was simply the fastest car in the world) made usable by layers of polished development in every
