And yet a simple phrase from a child has summed up why Lotus needs to be here. My son doesn’t care about 75 years of heritage and has no knowledge of Colin Chapman, Gold Leaf and Jim Clark, of Elises and Esprits. He judges this car totally at face value without any of our baggage – and he likes what he sees.

Admittedly, his interests are somewhat niche: the Eletre has cameras for wing mirrors and he can play electric window tennis with his younger brother, thanks to each rear seat having controls for both rear windows (worried parents – you can disable this). Such are the parameters of youth.

But still, the wider point stands. If Lotus wants to sell 150,000 cars a year by 2028, the vast majority of people buying those cars will never have sat in a Lotus before. Just as even Ferrari isn’t immune to the SUV, so it is with Lotus.

So we need to approach this test wearing two hats – there’s the ‘does it work as a car?’ element and then the more nuanced ‘how is it as a Lotus?’ verdict.

It all looks pretty promising for the first part. Lotus has ticked a lot of boxes in its quest to build a modern SUV, far more than it ever used to do when it launched a sports car. To start with, it feels really well made. There’s an integrity to the fit and finish that used to be notable for its absence in a Lotus – the controls have heft and solidity behind them, the enormous 29-inch infotainment screen works and largely has a sense of logic to it. Even the warranty is better, at five years and 100,000 miles. Say what you like about a Lotus being built in China, but if the upshot is an interior that feels like it will last the distance, then everyone is a winner (even if some of the gold plastic is a bit too much like one of those Chinese waving cats. You can’t de-spec it).

This quality shouldn’t be underestimated. Lotus has always been amazing at doing the tricky stuff – ride, handling, making a car dance with the driver – but couldn’t get basics like heating correct. I drove an Exige once that did an excellent job of de-misting the windscreen, but only on the passenger side. Now, all of that is resolved. The boot is a decent size, the seats are comfortable and there’s loads of room in the back. That may sound boring, but it matters.

Standard kit is extensive, even in the base model. Massive 22-inch alloys, four-zone climate control, USB-C charge points everywhere, multiple options for the leather interior (including a hangover-inducing mint green option at £4950), heated and cooled seats, heated steering wheel, brilliant speaker system – these are all crucial boxes that need ticking if Lotus is to compete with BMW and Mercedes. There’s even a digital passenger display. In some previous Lotuses, you’d be lucky to get a glovebox.

Naturally, all this comes with a weight penalty – founder Chapman’s insistence of minimal weight has come to this, a 2.5-tonne four-wheel-drive behemoth. Lotus is at pains to stress the weight saving on offer – frameless aluminium doors save 6kg! – but in reality there’s a 109kWh battery under the floor and no amount of aluminium (43 per cent of the platform) will counteract that.

Still, if you work it out in pounds per person, the Eletre is actually a more efficient use of weight than the combustion-engined Emira sports car (504kg per body vs 702kg in the two-seater), so there’s some good news to tell your mates.

The Eletre runs a permanent-magnet, twin-motor set-up (one on each axle) that produce 603bhp in the two lesser models. Zero to 62mph is 4.5 seconds, unremarkable for a punchy EV, so you’ll need the £120,000 R with its two-speed transmission and 2.95sec time to get near a Tesla Model X Plaid. Its 800-volt cabling technology yields a maximum charge speed of up to 350kW, trumping the others on this test.

That’s in marked contrast to the Audi SQ8 e-Tron, with its maximum intake speed of just 170kW. Still, this latest version carries a larger battery pack of 106kWh that, along with more advanced asynchronous motors and a better aero package (the base Q8 e-tron’s drag coefficient is a slippery 0.27), gain it better efficiency figures.

The difficulty for Audi is that everyone else has also moved on, so the SQ8 is improved compared to its earlier iteration but still not class-leading. A claimed range of 269 miles is the poorest here and it’s also the heaviest car. At 496bhp, it can’t compete with the Lotus on power, but the tri-motor set-up yields 717lb ft which helps it match the Eletre’s 0-62mph time.

Changes to the steering, air suspension and styling were also pushed through during the facelift, while the interior remains largely the same. It apes the twin touchscreens of other Audis (top is infotainment, bottom is climate control) but up against both the Lotus and Porsche isn’t as immediately intuitive. The Lotus isn’t perfect (why go to the bother of physical climate controls for changing the temperature and then burying the heated seats in the screen’s menu??), but it’s easier to master. In the Audi, it’s a struggle to know where you should be aiming your finger, with sub-menus and shortcuts across both screens. Plus, the Lotus is more visually interesting.

Doubtless owners would get used to it quickly, but I don’t see why the Audi needs to be this complicated. Even the Taycan, with a similar twin-screen set-up, does a better job of separating what each display does.

The Porsche Taycan has been on sale for the same amount of time as the Audi, but nailed its brief with much more certainty on day one. Even the Audi’s name has changed (e-Tron to Q8 e-Tron), reflecting a rethink about naming conventions, but also suggesting a degree of uncertainty at Ingolstadt that hasn’t been matched at Porsche. Other than the daft policy of calling an electric model a Turbo, the Porsche is clear in its aim.

It joins this test as the least SUV-ish, with a boot and raised ride height (20mm over the Sport Turismo and saloon) but without the ultimate levels of practicality that define the Lotus and Audi; the rear seats are by far the tightest. But it’s been our favourite EV ever since its launch, costs a similar (equally eye-watering) amount to the other two, and offers enough of a mix of usability and desirability to put it on many a wish list.

Like the Lotus, it’s a skateboard battery arrangement with twin synchronous permanent-magnet motors. The Audi’s asynchronous arrangement inherently gives more torque, but because the Porsche is 480kg lighter, the end result is a similar 0-62mph time. A twin-speed transmission, better for splitting the dual demands of punchy acceleration and efficient high-speed running, is standard on the Porsche.

The Taycan feels the most dynamic of the trio, even sitting still. Part of that is to do with how much closer to the tarmac you sit (you very much drop down into the Porsche, whereas the Audi and Lotus require a slight hitch up), but also because the cabin environment is more enveloping. A large, clear digital dash lies ahead, in marked contrast to the Lotus’s thin strip. Both work well, as does the Audi’s multi-display set-up, but the Taycan feels more in tune with what makes Porsches special than the Eletre manages in terms of its Lotus heritage.

One small point before we start driving them – given how adaptable touchscreens can be, why don’t manufacturers adjust them for right-hand drive? Both the Porsche and Lotus have useful shortcuts buried over on the left-hand side, miles away from the driver.

So… driving. Has any car intrigued as much as the Lotus in 2023? It certainly gets loads of attention whenever it stops, people eager to know how it drives. The answer is that it’s a little weird.

The first thing that strikes you is the ride quality. Unlike Lotuses of the past, what happens at one corner affects another, so you’re left with a sense of being rocked from side to side as you drive down the road. It’s as if the anti-roll bar is too stiff so that everything is transmitted across the cabin, with no isolation.

It’s odd because the car comes with adaptive dampers and air suspension as standard, but there’s no disguising that it feels too stiff, especially on trunk roads where you’d want it to be more relaxing. Would the Lotus Dynamic Handling pack sort it? This comes with an active anti-roll bar and active rear-wheel steering, the former of which should help by disengaging the car’s lateral stiffness when it’s not needed. But it’s also £6599, so you’d definitely want to know it works; it wasn’t fitted to our test car.

There are several driving modes, including Tour and Sport, but Sport is by far the best in all circumstances. Even on bumpy roads I find myself using Sport more, because at least that way the whole chassis feels keyed in. It’s too stiff, but at least it’s consistently stiff.

Driving the car hard is where you start to get more rewards. Because while on the motorway there’s an odd buffeting (I keep thinking a window is open, but it isn’t) and the ride is poor, pushing hard makes the car come alive a bit more. Getting on the power out of a corner brings the torque vectoring into play, tightening the line and giving a sense that the car is trying to engage with you. The steering, although with little feel, is precise and allows you to pick a line with confidence.

But quirks remain. The steering goes oddly light in your hands if you accelerate hard. It’s not the effortless process it should be in a £100k SUV.

That doesn’t happen in the Taycan, where there’s a sense that the controls are all in equal play, a democratic set of engineering parameters that have been carefully honed to harmonise. In the Eletre, it feels like some are created more equal than others.

The Porsche’s driving modes – altering characteristics including the steering and damper stiffness – make much more sense. Normal mode is just what you need for 99 per cent of journeys. Everything feels natural, reactive and lithe; ask the car to do something and it behaves as you’d expect. Nothing ever catches you out, with the result that you can concentrate on just enjoying driving. It’s a beautiful car in which to relax into a drive, with enough effortless feel through the steering and seat to know exactly what is going on, but not so much that you’re bombarded with unnecessary information.

That said, the brakes aren’t as good as the Eletre’s. The Lotus has more consistent weight through the pedal’s movement, whereas the Taycan is too vague at the top of its travel. It’s a strange miss from a firm that is so obsessed with braking performance and feel.

The downside of that performance on all three cars is, of course, the economy figures. The test numbers we get are poor all around but don’t reflect what you could expect if you were to spend longer in the cars over more mixed, less enthusiastic journeys, something that isn’t possible during our brief time with the cars. The Audi should manage 220 miles, the Porsche 240 and the Lotus 300.

It’s a shame the Audi can’t compete with the efficiency of the others because a long journey in foul weather is otherwise its strongest suit. There’s an ease of use that means you’d pick the SQ8 if you needed to be somewhere with the least amount of hassle.

The ride is the best on test. While the Eletre wobbles and the Taycan can get caught out by cross-axle ridges, the Audi absorbs it all with more fluidity, pushing across bumps rather than getting caught out by them. It’s on larger and heavier wheels than the Taycan (21-inch versus 20-inch rims), but it doesn’t get flustered if a wheel drops into a lumpier bit of tarmac.

Equally, though, there is very little excitement. Whereas the Porsche and Lotus have a bit of dynamic flair, there’s very little going on underneath the skin of the Audi. Precise, safe, dull would be three words to sum up the experience. The tri-motor set-up promises much but doesn’t give the same accelerative punch as the others here and doesn’t allow the car to power-carve on the exit of a corner.

The steering has been re-tuned for this facelifted version, including lowering the ratio for more precision, but it still doesn’t get close to the others. The Porsche offers the most feedback, the Lotus is very precise, but the Audi just feels flat in your hands.

Like in the Lotus, you’ll need to disable the lane-keeping assistance system as soon as you set off. But mercifully there’s a simple button on the end of the indicator stalk in the SQ8, whereas the Lotus requires a dive into the touchscreen. The Porsche system stays off once you’ve set it that way – just one more instance of how it helps ease you into a journey.