Lotus officials also say while the combustion-engine Emira may carry on for longer than planned, Lotus doesn’t have plans for re-entry into Formula 1, at least “not yet.”
- Sports car maker plans to be building 150,000 cars a year by 2028.
- That’s a 2340% increase on last year’s global volumes.
- Three new Chinese-built EVs to transform brand’s fortunes.
Last month we told you about Lotus’s plans to float its Technology division on the NASDAQ ahead of the start of sales of its new range of EVs. Now we can put some more numbers of the scale of the brand’s future ambitions. And, spoiler alert, they are very ambitious indeed.
For perspective consider the fact that Lotus has never previously sold more than 5000 cars globally in a single year, and the company says that at no point in its 75-year history have more than a thousand of those come to the U.S. during one 12-month period. But with the arrival of the Lotus Eletre EV, plus the two models that are set to be built in the same plant in Wuhan, China, that is set to change dramatically. By 2028 Lotus is planning to be producing 150,000 of its new electric models each year in China, with around 50,000 of those coming to north America.
Which is why Autoweek grabbed some time with Lotus’s newly appointed Chief Commercial Officer Mike Johnstone at the Shanghai auto show to ask him how such a radical transformation is going to happen.
Lotus isn’t going to give up on making sports cars, with the eagerly anticipated Emira about to go on sale in the U.S., but they will obviously become a much smaller part of the business going forward.
“The relationship is effectively that Lotus cars [in the UK] is a manufacturer and supplier of sports vehicles, while the Wuhan factory creates our ‘lifestyle’ cars,” Johnstone says, “but we’re one brand. I’m passionate that within the organization we have to talk about and think about one brand. Lotus is global, it won’t matter where the product comes from or which market we’re in, we have to be one Lotus.”
The final gas-engine Lotus, the Emira is about to hit showrooms.
Lotus Cars
The Eletre will be the first of the new-age Lotus products to reach the U.S., although we will have to wait until next year for it to arrive. Lotus insiders say that the process for Federal type approval still has to be undertaken, but that the first customers will be getting cars by the end of 2024. As with Tesla’s recent decision to supply some Model Y from Shanghai to China, the Lotus EVs reaching the States will all be Chinese-built—despite the need to pay a swingeing 27.5-percent import tariff to bring it in. One obvious way to reduce that would be to manufacture locally, as both Volvo and Polestar—part of the same Zhejiang Geely Holding Group which owns Lotus—have already committed to doing. But that isn’t planned for the moment.
“Our plan is based on exporting from China to the U.S., but we will definitely look at other ways in which we can do it,” Johnstone says, “and not just in the U.S., to be honest with you—there are other markets you could manufacture in that would help from a tariff point of view.”
Lotus is also committed to being a pioneer of higher-level autonomy, with the Eletre getting multiple LIDAR sensors to enable it to operate safely at speed. In China we’re told that it is already able to drive up to 200 km—125 miles—between the need for driver intervention. The company reckons that is broadly equivalent to Level 3 autonomy. But the target is rapidly to incrementally move that figure all the way up to 100,000 km, or 62,000 miles. As more permissive autonomy rules are introduced in the States, Lotus hopes to be able to immediately exploit them.
As we reported before, the Eletre will be joined in 2025 by a sedan sitting on the same EPA platform, with a smaller Porsche Macan-sized SUV arriving in 2026, all being purely electric. Lotus is also working on an EV sports car which we will see in 2027, but the unknown part of the product plan—for the company as well as outsiders—is how long the combustion-engined Emira will live for. The original idea seems to have been to directly replace it with the EV two-seater, but Johnstone admits that European moves to permit the continued sale of vehicles powered by so-called e-fuels could extend the Emira’s life considerably further.
The first next-gen Lotus to reach the States will be the electric Eletre, due here in 2024.
Lotus
“I wouldn’t rule anything out, and that is definitely something that the engineering team are aware of,” he said, “one issue is always going to be different standards in different parts of the world, which is always bad for any lower-volume model, but our product plan is flexible enough to change based on legislation and customer demand.”
One thing missing, despite Lotus’s heritage, is any plan to return to top-flight racing. Despite being one of the most famous motorsport brands in the world, Lotus doesn’t do anything more potent than GT4 at present. Should the sales renaissance not be led by an elite works race program?
“It’s not part of our plan at the moment, but we know it is an incredibly powerful part of our history,” Johnstone says, “if we find ourselves half way into the plan and we’re delivering or exceeding it, then I’m sure we’ll start looking at how we can escalate the brand to the right level… What we need to concentrate on is the fact we’re trying to take a brand that sold 641 cars last year to a brand selling more than 150,000 cars in five years’ time. We have to deliver on that first.”
But when we got to put the same question to Lotus CEO Feng Qingfeng, he gave a more nuanced answer, albeit one delivered through an interpreter.
“We have not yet the plan for Formula 1,” Feng said.
There’s enough wriggle room in that ‘yet’ to keep things interesting.
Mike Duff European Editor Mike Duff has been writing about the auto industry for two decades and calls the UK home, although he normally lives life on the road.
Keyword: Lotus Shoots for the Moon—and 150,000 Sales a Year