The Lotus Emeya S is one fantastic looking, tech-filled car, but it just doesn’t live up to the brand’s heritage.
The Lotus Emeya took home our VOTY 2025 award for exterior design, so we can establish our feelings on the way the car looks. This Porsche Taycan rival is part of the brand’s ambitious electric offensive following their acquisition by Geely. In the age of the close-to-tax-free EV, how does an RM643,000 car present itself as ‘good value’? More pertinent, how does a 2.5 tonne behemoth carry the Lotus badge and does it manage to deliver on the performance front? Well, stick around to find out.
Introduction
The Lotus Emeya is a four door luxury performance sedan. It follows the footsteps of giants like the Porsche Taycan and Panamera, offering a sportscar experience to the driver and a limo-like lounge for the rear passenger. In a way, it’s a relatively new segment, but taking a wider view, it’s actually a continuation of one of the oldest European-dominated segments in automotive history – the 2+2 GT. Essentially, if you’re rich but not stuffy, you might think about being driven around in this on the weekdays as it’ll also serve you well as a weekend car. It’s honestly a very specific niche, but one that serves a very affluent audience.
In Malaysia, we got the Lotus Emeya in August of 2024. 3 variants are available here, the base Emeya, the Emeya S and the Emeya R. Every model is equipped with a 102kWh lithium-ion battery and dual motor all-wheel drive. The base and S variants have an output of 603 horsepower and 710Nm of torque enabling a 0-100km/h time of 4.2 seconds. The Emeya R variant cranks things up substantially to 905 horsepower and 985Nm of torque for a 2.8 second century sprint time. It’s a little excessive, to be honest and we’re happy our test unit was the ‘middle child’.
First Impressions and Design
There’s always something ethereal about test driving a car that’s usually reserved for the 1% or T20. Years ago I didn’t even have the context to tell you where each of these luxury and performance brands stood in relation to each other.
Thankfully, ten years and 600 cars later, the mountain seemed more surmountable than I expected and yet these new cutting edge EVs present new types of hills to get over.
For instance, the Emeya’s side view mirrors, they’re not mirrors. They’re side-view displays with input coming from side-view cameras.
Thinking about opening the doors and getting inside the car? Well, the doors open themselves, so good luck trying to get your head around that on your first try.
All of these tech pieces are there, ostensibly, to give potential customers a sense of awe. You’ve already seen a car door open a thousand times before, but now you get to see it open (and close) by itself. It’s the magic that made you want to hang a poster up of a Lamborghini when you were growing up. It was hard not to be excited about the little show the Emeya put on. Even without the drama, its stationary form is a thing to behold.
It has the flair of an Italian supercar, a tech-forward face and a silhouette so sleek you’ll wonder how they squeezed so many doors on it. Our unit was finished in Fireglow Orange and we couldn’t think of a better shade to go with such an eye-catching design. The 21″ 10-spoke grey wheels paired well to give the car some nice contrast. We couldn’t help but to deploy that rear spoiler for the photoshoot. The Emeya has that way of bringing that child in you out I suppose.
There are nice interiors and there are NICE interiors and the Lotus Emeya has the latter. It’s not just the materials that they’ve gone to 11 with, it’s the colours. Light grey has always been seen as a really boring upholstery choice.
No one would spec their dream sportscar in grey upholstery. And yet in the Lotus Emeya, the light grey upholstery is, dare I say it, inspired.
There about 50 different shades of it in here and all of them provide that little bit of micro contrast to make the cabin come alive. It takes artistry to play with tones that subtly. Even the use of carbon fibre here is pretty interesting.
They’ve managed to make the material come across as sophisticated and luxurious, plus you get some textured plastics that match the carbon fibre look in a sort of jeweled way.
Unfortunately, the Emeya sadly lost to another Geely Group/Sentinel Automotive brand in the Cabin of the Year Awards. There’s no fighting those Zeerk 009’s captain seats. Still this was a close second with loads of original features we hadn’t seen in any other vehicle like the tri-coloured seatbelts in classic Lotus hues.
There were things in here we hadn’t heard in any other vehicle either, KEF Reference Audio system in here and its 23 speakers included. Simply unmatched.
We should also take this opportunity to mention some of the displays in the Emeya as there are quite a number of them.
Right in the centre of the dashboard is the largest of the lot – a 15.1″ unit complete with slick animations and a responsive touch interface. It’s impressive as far as in-car screens go. Just about every control and setting is buried somewhere in this massive display and that’s the part that may not jive well with some buyers looking for a more user-friendly physical interface. It’s a little excessive that they’ve gone to the extent of using a game engine and fitting two Snapdragon 8155 chips to power the display and provide the realistic rendering of the Emeya right there on the screen.
In front of the driver and the front passenger you’ll find a pair of super slim 12.6″ displays that gives you some ‘at a glace’ info. The driver gets a digital instrument cluster and the front passenger gets a little media interface.
On each of the doors, you’ll find a little high-res, high-refresh display that serve as side mirrors.
Around back, a deployable screen sits in the armrest between the two rear passengers and this gives access to to some seat adjustments, sunroof electrochromic controls and sound settings.
And yes, it does have one of those electrochromic glass roofs that go from opaque to transparent at a touch of a button. Another one of those touches to add drama to the cabin.
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the rear-seat experience. The Lotus Emeya does really awesome job of pampering those in the rear with supportive seats that recline and offer up a massage. The left seat transforms into a business class experience. Just make sure no one’s sitting in the front passenger seat and brief the driver to take things slow.
We should also mention the rather limited bootspace. The battery pack and sloped roof have really eaten into the Emeya’s cargo carrying potential here.
That being said, you do get underfloor storage and a frunk for cables, a tyre inflator and whatever else you need to permanently keep in the car.
Performance
Getting into the Lotus, it does feel very inviting and comfortable. There’s something about the GT form factor that appeals to me. It manages to ride that fine line between comfortable and dynamic so nicely. There’s very little to complain about in the way the Emeya S handles typical Malaysian roads. While it’s obviously not an S-Class replacement, it’s actually not harsh at all. With some careful circumnavigation of potholes, you could chauffer around a couple of respectable clients in this thing. And in a straight line this thing is pretty insane.
And yet, it’s hard to escape the feeling that something’s wrong with the whole formula. This is nothing like what you’d typically expect a Lotus to feel like. You’re not so low to the ground, you’re not feeling every surface imperfection, and you’re certainly not hearing the scream of a small engine being wrung out. It’s the opposite of that, obviously. You get nothing but an electric hum even when you’re in ‘warp speed’. Combined with the strange sensation of checking screens before changing lanes and the whole experience comes across a little too video gamey than anything.
Make no mistake, this is not a reproval of the way the car has been tuned. In fact, it would take a team with the engineering expertise of Lotus to make a vehicle weighing 2.5 tonnes carve corners with this much ease and confidence. It’s just that it doesn’t feel very Lotus-like, it just isn’t a very organic machine. The thing is we’ve seen other Geely Group EVs pull off an ‘organic’ feel at the lighter end. Cars like the smart #1 and #3 or even the Volvo EX30 all feel like they put some fun back into the electric age. The Lotus Emeya S feels a little too cut and dry. It has the performance numbers but just doesn’t deliver anything but shock and awe in a straight line.
Maybe that’s a misinterpretation of what this car was intended for. After all it is a comfortable GT and not an out-and-out sports car. In that context, it really is hard to find any objective faults with the way this car drives. I have an informal test for what I’d consider a comfortable car and it’s this: would I put my dad in the back seat of this thing. The Lotus Emeya passed that test even though it really doesn’t look like the kind of car that normally would.
If anything, the one major complaint was those digital sideview mirrors. I found myself having to turn and carry out life-savers about 10 times more often than I normally do. I just could not accurately judge the speed and distance of oncoming vehicles with those screens.
And during spirited driving, I found them completely unfit for purpose when carrying out tight lane changes. There’s just no depth perception there to be found there. What’s more, I found the my eyes were strained by constantly moving focus from the road up ahead (10s of meters away) to the screens in the car (half a meter). It’s the only real thing holding this car back from being a real problem for Porsche.
Value
And that’s where we can start to talk about bigger picture questions. This car is positioned to be a Taycan killer, but it’s not the car that’s striking a meaningful blow. There are rumours floating now that Porsche will pull the Taycan from China and it’s not related to the arrival of the Emeya at all, rather a diminishing demand for high-end electric luxury performance vehicles. The death blow comes from a slew of Chinese electric performance vehicles priced at relatively ‘sane’ prices. Cars like the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra are the ones that are disrupting the market and Geely has to ask itself if its heavy investment in brand equity was the right way to go.
That’s maybe a little too big picture for a car review, but the bottom line is this. The ongoing excise duty break on imported electric vehicles has leveled the playing field in the car industry. While the T20s may look at this as an exciting time to spend money on the cream of the crop of the EV world, I think what they may end up finding is the gap in ACTUAL value between the cheapest EV and the most expensive EV is far smaller than the gap in price indicates.
I’m not saying the Emeya is seperated by the Atto 3 by a couple of airbags. I’m saying that you can get about all the EV you could ask for at RM200,000 and the actual gains in performance, range, size and equipment really falls off beyond RM250,000. 0-100km/h in 4.2 seconds is fast, but a BYD Seal does that in 3.8 seconds at less than a third the price. A Tesla Model 3 Performance does it in 3.1 seconds for RM244K.
At RM643,000, the Lotus Emeya S tries in earnest to deliver a sense of awe at what a supercar of the future might look and feel like. They’ve gone above and beyond other EVs to deliver an experience that is pretty much top-tier.
However I think Geely hasn’t quite transitioned Lotus into this new identity of ‘Porsche chaser’ well. It’s almost as if they expected the crowd to be enthusiastic for competition in this space of subjective appeal and brand equity.
Ultimately the value proposition of this Emeya S is hurt by those two aspects: EVs are the great equalizer and this doesn’t feel like any historical Lotus the car community has come to love. It’s such a shame, because the product itself is competitive in its segment.
Lotus Emeya S Specifications
Battery Capacity: 112 kWh
Range: 540km
Max power: 603 hp
Max torque: 710Nm
Gearbox: Single-speed automatic
Top Speed: 250km/h
0-100 km/h: 4.2 seconds
Selling Price: RM643,000
