One-off Lotus Evora range-extending hybrid goes up for sale

Prototype Evora 414E hybrid is available to buy from a Lotus collector for £150,000, with potential to make it road-legal

As Lotus embarks on a bold new future that includes electric hypercars, a unique piece of the company’s history in sportscar electrification has come up for sale.

The 2012 Lotus Evora 414E is a range-extending hybrid prototype that is now being offered by its owner for £150,000. The car is powered by twin electric motors fed by a 15kWh battery pack that’s kept topped up by a 1.2-litre, three-cylinder range-extender engine.

It was good for a claimed 4.4-second sprint to 62mph and a top speed of 133mph. The powertrain never made production, and Lotus sold the car to a local businessman and Lotus aficionado, Stuart Monument, in 2016.

“I think they needed the money quite desperately so they sold some of the cars that just hung around not doing anything. I was lucky enough to buy it,” Monument told Autocar. “I got the sense it was important they sold it to a keen enthusiast of the brand”.

Monument hired some of the original Lotus staff to get it up and running again and then took it to a local airfield for a blast. Since then, however, it’s just sat in a garage.

“It’s something unique and if you’re a car freak you end up doing those sort of things,” he said. The car isn’t road legal but it has got a chassis number and Monument reckons it might be possible to register, although he hasn’t personally investigated it. It comes with two spare battery packs.

Monument also bought a ‘half-car’ cutaway version of the Evora showing off the technology, which Lotus, now under new Geely ownership, has bought back. He says he hasn’t had the call from Lotus about the 414E yet, “but you never know”. Monument also owns a unique Lotus Esprit with experimental active suspension.

The 414E was built as part of a project involving Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover, gearbox specialist Xtrac and EVO Electric, an electric motor producer. Funded partly with a £19 million government grant, the project also produced the Infiniti Emerg-E prototype, essentially a reskinned Evora 414E.

The car perhaps isn’t as an important historical piece as, say, the first version of the Tesla Roadster, for which Lotus built the rolling shells. The car was also 377kg heavier than the 1382kg showroom Evora, blunting its appeal somewhat. But who knows what significance it’ll take on as Lotus moves into electrification? We ended our review of the prototype by saying “you’re highly unlikely to be able to buy one in the future”. We were wrong. 

Nick Gibbs

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