The name Lotus belongs right up there with the top sports car manufacturers in Europe and the UK. But it's stopped short of producing the same kind of hypercars that we've come to expect from the likes of Bugatti and Koenigsegg, or even Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, and Porsche. That, however, could all change, if the latest reports are to be believed.

According to Autocar, the British marque, known for making some of the sweetest-handling performance machines on the market, is planning a new electric hypercar that looks poised to positively blow the doors off anything it's made before.

Details are few and far between, but Autocar points to to Lotus' new parent company Geely as the impetus for the project. We could be looking at around 1,000 horsepower and all-wheel drive among the specifications.

Though it'd mark new territory for Lotus, this wouldn't be the first time that an electric vehicle or a hypercar would be built atop the company's superlative chassis. The Hennessey Venom GT and original Tesla Roadster both borrowed heavily from the Elise/Exige architecture, as have the Detroit Electric SP.01, the Dodge EV concept, and countless other external projects to which Lotus has contributed its expertise.

Lotus has also experimented with electrified motivation itself, most notably with the Evora 414E hybrid concept. It could very well tap into the electric-propulsion expertise being developed by Volvo and its new Polestar offshoot to power the touted new hyper-EV. But founder Colin Chapman's famous ethos of "adding lightness" would serve it well in combatting the extra weight inherent in the batteries that'd be needed to juice the thing. And the handling dynamics would be all up to the boys in Hethel. Or at least, so we hope.