CAR UK November 2021

‘No rare earths… crystal glass… a magic carpet over the road…’ Well, thank God for that. BMW’s iX is superb. I can’t describe the sense of relief. (It’s right up there with getting the call from features man James Taylor to say that our Sports Car of the Year test – page 88 – had passed without incident. No Ferrari SF90s in the Irish Sea; no 911 GT3-shaped holes in the Welsh landscape; no calls to our insurance company trying to explain that, really, dangling a photographer from a sideways M4 is absolutely essential business, and had never gone wrong before…) Why so relieved that the iX isn’t a duffer? Because while every single BMW-affiliated soul I’ve spent time with over the last year and half has been very keen to tell me…

THE MONTH ACCORDING TO CAR Five years ago, car lovers would have scoffed at the dream of Lotus introducing five all-new cars in five years. But that’s the emphatic statement of intent from Lotus Cars and its parent company Geely Holdings, with key details outlined by managing director Matt Windle in an interview with CAR. Since car number one of the new model offensive – the mid-engined, petrol-powered Emira coupe – was revealed in CAR’s August issue, a wave of transformative developments has broken. There’s a £900m investment in a Lotus Technology R&D campus in Wuhan, China, also including a purpose-built Lotus factory. Lotus Cars has shown its lightweight electric sports car architecture, sharing key technical details. And Peter Horbury, a grandee of car design who transformed Volvo and Ford’s North American…

‘No rare earths… crystal glass… a magic carpet over the road…’ Well, thank God for that. BMW’s iX is superb. I can’t describe the sense of relief. (It’s right up there with getting the call from features man James Taylor to say that our Sports Car of the Year test – page 88 – had passed without incident. No Ferrari SF90s in the Irish Sea; no 911 GT3-shaped holes in the Welsh landscape; no calls to our insurance company trying to explain that, really, dangling a photographer from a sideways M4 is absolutely essential business, and had never gone wrong before…) Why so relieved that the iX isn’t a duffer? Because while every single BMW-affiliated soul I’ve spent time with over the last year and half has been very keen…

‘The thing about EVs is they’re not light,’ wryly notes Lotus head of vehicle concepts Richard Rackham. But with Lotus’s forthcoming electric sports car architecture, they have to be. Rackham’s team have painstakingly finessed LEVA to get weight out. ‘Biomesh’ computer modelling the rear suspension enables sections to be scooped out to reduce mass, while calculations ensure the material still has sufficient rigidity. It leaves a beautiful aluminium structure with a finish resembling Swiss cheese. The rear electric motors don’t have their own subframe, but are bolted directly onto the cradle. Similarly the modular battery has no enclosure – that’s provided by the vehicle, once the battery tray is slid into place. The die-cast rear structure, made from a special alloy developed with help from Brunel University, is designed to pass US crash…

THE MONTH ACCORDING TO CAR Five years ago, car lovers would have scoffed at the dream of Lotus introducing five all-new cars in five years. But that’s the emphatic statement of intent from Lotus Cars and its parent company Geely Holdings, with key details outlined by managing director Matt Windle in an interview with CAR. Since car number one of the new model offensive – the mid-engined, petrol-powered Emira coupe – was revealed in CAR’s August issue, a wave of transformative developments has broken. There’s a £900m investment in a Lotus Technology R&D campus in Wuhan, China, also including a purpose-built Lotus factory. Lotus Cars has shown its lightweight electric sports car architecture, sharing key technical details. And Peter Horbury, a grandee of car design who transformed Volvo and Ford’s…

►You’d think the last thing on the priority list of top managers would be low-volume, high-end niche models. But halo cars are the salt in an increasingly thin soup of me-too products devoid of truly significant USPs. Mercedes is now actively embracing the category of future electric trend-setters. ►The one-off EQXX, bound for January’s Consumer Electronics show, will soon demonstrate what can be achieved when R&D is prepared to pull out all the stops, irrespective of cost and feasibility. Why? Because, right now, the focus is very much on EVs and thus on advanced batteries, software, drivetrains and design, even if the EQ prefix becomes dispensable at the end of the decade when most of Merc’s range is electric anyway. ►One of those new models is a two-seater designed to merge two…