When you’re an automaker and your new boss is an engineer, it’s a good start. When you’re moving into electric vehicles, and he has also worked on the original Tesla Roadster, that’s another good sign.
Fortunately for Lotus, its new Managing Director has done both. The company is moving into the EV space with the upcoming Evija electric hypercar and it will be well led by Matt Windle, who joined Tesla in 2005 as an engineer to work on the first-gen Roadster.
Based on the Lotus Elise, the Roadster’s engineering ended up needing extensive changes. And it taught Windle a lot, too.
“It made me realize what you can do with [electric] cars as well,” Windle told Car Magazine in a recent interview. “They come with their challenges but also a lot of benefits: heat management, packaging, and if you put the batteries at the bottom, the center of gravity is much lower.”
Also Watch: What Does James May Think Of The Lotus Evija Electric Hypercar?
Windle says he was lucky enough to run hundreds of laps in the Tesla Roadster development car and called it exhilarating, even though he understands how some people could miss the tuneful note of an internal combustion engine.
“Engine noise is part of the emotion,” he says. “But it’s about performance as well. We wanted Evija to have core Lotus DNA: performance, dynamics, aerodynamics. And that’s why the car’s been designed the way it is.”
Even though Lotus will still be making sports cars, it plans to launch its last ICE-powered one, codenamed the Type 131, in early 2022. Going all-electric is still a big change for the company, but Windle has learned a lot about managing his people from Musk.
“Working with Elon [Musk] laid the foundations for my management style: make decisions, look after and empower people but concentrate on the actions immediately in front of you that need to be achieved so that you can achieve the overall strategy,” he told Car Magazine.
It will be exciting to see how that style works when the production spec 1,973 hp Evija is fully unveiled later this year.
