The Lotus Evija hypercar – at the time of its announcement, the most powerful road-legal car to enter series production – has set a series of new searing performance benchmarks as part of its full Autocar Road Test.
First shown to the world in 2019, with deliveries to customers beginning in 2024, the Evija has swept all before it among yardsticks for acceleration particular to higher speed ranges. It is now the quickest car recorded in Autocar’s annals of road test performance figures, which themselves date back more than a century, when measured from standing to 150mph; and to 200mph; and over both a standing quarter-mile and kilometre.
Autocar’s landmark ten-page road test of the £2mil, 2013bhp Evija is in the 30th July print issue of Autocar, on newsagents’ shelves today, which is also available in digital form here and on Apple News + here.
Moreover, the margin of its dominance in at least three of those four measurements is monumentally large. “The Evija’s acceleration feels fast, but less exceptionally so through both 60- and 100mph,” said Autocar Road Test Editor Matt Saunders. “But the extraordinary potency of its four electric motors, combined with the car’s improving capacity to put that power down as downforce builds on its body, makes it downright staggering to experience beyond 100mph.”
“From 100- to 150mph, it’s almost three seconds faster than any other hypercar we’ve ever figured; from 150- to 200-, more like five seconds. It can accelerate from 150- to 180mph in the same time (2.7sec) that it takes a BMW M4 CS to get from 60- to 90-.”
The Evija becomes only the third road-legal production car that Autocar has tested all the way to 200mph; which it cleared leaving plenty of room for braking within a measured mile. “We habitually figure cars over a standing kilometre as part of our road test benchmarking, in order that we’ve always got some safety margin” Saunders continued. “It’s rare, but not unknown, for road-legal cars to be doing more than 180mph at that point. But the Evija went past the kilometre marker at fully 217.4mph, already straining against its electronic speed limiter.”