Lotus Elise Reborn As EV Concept That Charges In Six Minutes

So there’s no prizes for guessing who designed this EV concept. Before the man behind the original Lotus Elise S1, Julian Thomson joined GM, he worked on this project with CALLUM and Nyobolt. Using Nyobolt’s incredibly fast charging and lightweight battery technology, the Elise has been reimagined as a futuristic EV. The plan was to create a vehicle to showcase this technology that can charge from 0 to 100 percent in six minutes. That’s an impressive figure on its own but given it’s unlikely you’d ever run the battery down that much, charging from 20 to 80 percent would take around four minutes.

Instead of restomodding an Elise like similar EV projects, this concept is only based on it as far as the deisgn goes. The proportions have been blown up to make it more comparable to the size and weight of the Lotus Exige. The EV sports car sits on 19-inch wheels, has a range up to 250km (155 miles) and has around 470bhp, an impressive step up from the Elise. The battery system is said to be good for more than 2000 fast charging sessions before performance starts to dip.

Thanks to a compact battery configuration, the system fits into the ‘engine bay’ behind the driver which helps with weight placement. As with most concepts, this vehicle is unlikely to reach the market, at least not in this form. There’s currently no plans to start a production run of this vehicle, it’s purely to display what’s possible with advancing battery technology. Whilst the charging system works with the current public infrastructure, as fast chargers become faster, in theory, the technology can be scaled up to potentially provide solutions for larger EVs, buses and trucks.

See also: All-Electric Caterham Seven Concept Ready For The Track

The CALLUM/Nyobolt concept will be on display at Goodwood FoS this summer and a testing programme will begin towards the end of the year. Nyobolt’s battery technology is set to go into production in 2024 but if car manufacturers employ this new tech from Nyobolt we won’t see it in action on the roads for at least another three years.