The future electric Caterham will maintain the current model’s strenghts.
The next car has to be fun to drive.
The body will be either in aluminum or carbon fiber.
Does the English brand Caterham ring a bell? Caterham is this British division that builds replicas of the mythical Lotus Seven, the car that was imagined by none other than Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus. Over the years, Caterham became a distributor for Lotus, then obtained exclusivity a little later. In the 1970s, Caterham even received the production rights from Lotus and the adventure is still going on today.
For more than 50 years, therefore, Caterham has been extending the life of the Lotus Seven by building special editions, each more extraordinary than the next. But the British car brand must also think about the electric age. And this shift will not be made under the sign of nostalgia.
At least that’s what the brand’s new chief designer, Anthony Jannarelly, has said, to whom we owe the very exotic Lykan Hypersport by W Motors and his own Jannarelly Design-1, a sports car with a retro design.
The main designer partly declared to the British magazine Autocar that his mandate was clear: he must create this bridge between the current customers of Caterham and this other audience that the manufacturer hopes to conquer.
The good news is that the head of design already confirms that lightness is at the heart of the project. Simplicity is also a priority, an element that would be shared with the simplicity of the current Caterhams models. Driving pleasure will therefore be a priority for the designers of the new electric Caterham.
Mr. Jannarelly also describes the kind of person a Caterham driver should be. The latter is not part of the mass. He is a daring person, and this facet must be part of the design of the next Caterham. The brand’s CEO, Bob Laishley, also indicated that the next Caterham “will certainly not be a Seven”, but that the car will have all the features that Caterham customers are familiar with. The car will have a different steel frame than the one used on the current Seven, its six-panel body will be made of aluminum or carbon fiber, while it will have two doors and possibly a roof. Its development was designed for electric propulsion right from the start and only its rear wheels will be driven.We know, however, that the car will be more expensive than the current car and that the senior management of the company supported by VT Holdings, a Japanese company, intends to sell more copies than the gasoline model. The first images of this modern Caterham are not yet available, but it should be soon… over the next few months.
