The company's info says that their roadster is built at the Lotus factory along with the IC-engined cars. Makes sense, not having to yank-out the regular powertrain. Also, it appears that there are some changes to the body's appearance, again rightly done DURING assembly, not after.
Doesn't sound like a hack up job to me, other than that the body wasn't originally designed with electric propulsion in mind. I've seen similar "cobble-up jobs" done by "big name" auto manufacturers (cough, GM, cough).
For example, 1) the 1975 Chevy Monza was originally going to have a Wankel engine, but 6 months before intro, it was dropped (poor fuel economy and difficulty in meeting the brandnew 1975 emissions requirements) and replaced by a line of "normal" IC engines. Proof? It was a major service pain in the rear on those cars with the small V8 to replace two of the spark plugs that ended up inaccessible down in the engine bay. 2) The use of the 2.8L Citation V6 engine in the 1982 Camaro and Firebird. When the engine (which was designed for transverse mounting) was put in longitudinally, there were two "slight" problems- the distributor got crammed back against the firewall, making adjustment a MAJOR task, requiring a specially shaped adjustment tool to get to it for timing adjustments, and due to lack of stiffness in the interface with the transmission, two "stiffening rods" had to be bolted diagonally from the block to the tranny. And 3), the shoehorning of that same 2.8L engine into the Fiero to give it some measure of guts. Instead of installing the high-output version of the Quad-four engine (Oldsmobile property at that time), Pontiac chose to install the 2.8L V6, which just like the Monza 15 years previously, had a sparkplug issue- in this case, you couldn't get to the entire friggin' frontside sparkplug bank, as the firewall was right in front! Plugs had to be changed blindly, by feel alone. D-oh!
