Lotus expects to outgrow Hethel
It sold less than 2,000 cars this year - but Lotus's CEO doesn't think its factory's 10,000-unit capacity will accommodate it for long
It’s high times at Lotus. Following the Evija’s successful reveal, the firm has confirmed that it will continue readying itself for a major growth spurt by completing building work left unfinished when former boss Dany Bahar departed in 2012. CEO Phil Popham revealed to Automotive News Europe that the brand’s empty “skeleton building won't be a skeleton by the end of this year,” as it seeks to “quickly go beyond” the 1,700-unit output it managed in 2019.
Its aspirations do not stop there either. Popham suggested that Lotus would eventually ‘outgrow’ Hethel’s production capacity of more than 10,000 cars on two shifts, and spoke of the need for something ‘radical’ to happen at its current facility - or potentially somewhere else in the UK.
Popham – who took the helm at Lotus in September 2018, almost exactly a year after Geely bought a majority stake in the firm – said that the company’s soon to grow range would continue to focus on cars within the £50,000 to £100,000 bracket, the £2 million Evija being the obvious exception to the rule. He said that each car would be manufactured in one location because Lotus would not be up for “double tooling”, so rumours that a Lotus SUV will be made at the firm’s upcoming 150,000 capacity Chinese plant suggests that Hethel will have no role in its production.
Exactly which future models will succeed the company’s present sports car line-up – made of the longstanding Elise, Exige and Evora – is still to be confirmed. Although Popham did reveal that the brand “can go right from sports cars to sporty GTs to sporting sedans to crossovers to SUVs”, suggesting that they’re unlikely to all get direct successors.
However, while he confirmed that “electrification is part of [Lotus’s] future” and that future models would each get a fully electric variant, he also stated that the brand’s next new sports car “will have an internal combustion engine” and is due to be shown before the end of next year. A replacement for the Elise? Hope springs eternal.
Lotus has never had to close it's doors since the company was founded in 1948.
Right now Jaguar is in a worse situation than Lotus, having made an annual loss of 3.6 billion.
Best thing that could have happened to Lotus 10 years ago was if VW bought them. Yes they would have lost the `Light weight` ethos that Lotus are based on, but at least they would have turned their fortunes around and produced some cars that were well styled, well built, and appealed to the mass market. Then let Lotus go off and build some light weight specials for the hard core `Rich` buyers.
Right now Lotus sales might be down but they did make a profit last year and haven't released a truly new model in many years (the Evija being the first since 2015 with the release of the 3-11 which was a niche track car). Geely have invested 1.5 billion into Lotus cars so we can expect some dramatic changes. That amounts to more money than what was injected into Mclaren when they made the 12C.
Lotus will be able to tap into the Chinese car market which is huge and has alienated many other european and american car companies. But the Chinese connection for Lotus means it will be able to sell sports cars in China without the ridiculous taxation. Not only this but Geely owns a lot of tech companies in China who can provide ECU's EV powertrains and in car entertainment systems.
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