TG sits down with Lotus boss to discuss a bright future for the sports car brand


Here we go again. New owners at Lotus. Bright future promised. Talk of expansion, transformation, general sense of reaching for the sunlit uplands.

It’s happened too many times before. Talk of expansion, followed by a reality of retrenchment. Most notoriously when Lotus’s Malaysian owners promised huge investments and brought in high-profile managers, designers and engineers from successful European sports car companies. Aka the Dany Bahar era. Little concrete came of it.

But this time let’s look on the bright side. The new owner is Geely, a vast Chinese company of which you might not have heard. But you will know some of the things they’ve done.

Like buying Volvo, investing at least £15 million and letting Volvo get on with the job. Volvo has developed its own very Volvo-ish range of cars. At the same time it has done the XC40 by co-developing a platform with Geely’s best Chinese brand, Lynk & Co. It fuses Volvo’s expertise with new Chinese thinking in connectivity. And we’ve just seen the birth of Polestar as a sports EV maker.

Four years ago Geely bought the old London Taxis International. Now it’s on the point of revolutionising the London cab landscape with its electrified all-new TX taxi, built at a £300m all-new factory in the Midlands.

In other words, Geely doesn’t mess around with its acquisitions. It lets them flourish in their own way.

So a couple of weeks after Geely formally took a majority stake in Lotus, Top Gear is back in Lotus CEO Jean-Mac Gales’s office at the factory in Hethel. We’ve also come to drive the new Evora GT430. Gales airily claims it’s the ‘best car Lotus has ever made’. Sounds immodest. An hour later I drive it down the road and decide he might just be right.

Anyway Gales can afford a bit of verbal swagger. The new board has confirmed his tenure as CEO, and he points out that this makes him the longest-serving boss since Colin Chapman. In his time there the company has moved from terrifying loss to small profit.

His measures weren’t dramatic, just meticulous. The cars have become faster and lighter and he’s streamlined how they’re made. Importantly, quality is up, and warranty claims are now just a third as expensive as they were in 2014. Gales added new dealers in places where sports-car buyers live. Sales steadily rose.

“We did all we could and we did well to get profitable,” he said. “But we’re tiny. Now we will grow very very fast. Geely has bought the brand to develop it.” he says. “I’m the same CEO but I now have many more levers to pull. It was a ten-piece jigsaw, now it’s 2000 pieces. We have a new parts bin, new technologies, marketing synergies too.

“It will be a new chapter, composed of exciting gorgeous sports cars. Plus other body styles that fit our brand values. Look, the sports car market hasn’t been growing for ages. So we’ll do an SUV.”


Woah. We know every sports-car company wants to do an SUV. It’s just the law these days. But what of the sports cars? Last time I was in this room, less than a half-year ago, Gales said Lotus didn’t need fresh investment or ownership to do an all-new Elise. It was going to do it from internal funds, he had said, for launch in 2020.

He was quite detailed about it. “The new Elise will be faithful to the current one, but taking it to the 21st century. You will recognise it from 100m away as an Elise. It won’t go above a tonne. But it will be slightly bigger because it will comply with US regulations. The handling will be a benchmark. The structure will still be aluminium.”

So I ask him now if that plan still holds. “We’re now reviewing the whole model plan. A new plan will be ready early next spring.” At which point, a nervous cough from the PR. We all know ‘review’ is usually corporate-speak for ‘slash’.

“The Elise isn’t cancelled. Certainly not. But now we will be able to do something different, improved. It might not be called Elise. Everything is up for discussion. Not one new sports car, a few. Whatever we planned to do will become better.

“The team here needs to think bigger, on a new global perspective. Geely says ‘What can we do? Where can we go?’ Imagine what we can do with Volvo’s 48V mild hybrid, for torque and lightness. Imagine an electric turbo and three-cylinder engine. It lightens the car, so we might change the whole chassis.”

From which it sounds likely the current Elise will live longer than 2020 while the new one is re-thought from the ground up. Lotus traditionalists will rejoice at that.

Gales is very much the sports-car nut, steeped in Lotus history, obsessed with every engineering change to lighten and improve the cars, talking in encyclopaedic detail about Hethel lap times.

But, like every sports-car boss with dollar signs in his eyes, his talk soon swings back to an SUV.

“The SUV must take account of our brand, and take account of the technology in the group. And crucially take account of what customers want. They don’t want an SUV with fixed carbon seats or huge downforce.

“Still, what an Evora is to a 911 our SUV needs to be to a Cayenne.”

Lotus designers have worked on crossovers before, including a now moribund project to do one with another Chinese outfit, Goldstar. But this one is all-new and work hasn’t begun in earnest.

He mentions the Aston Martin DBX. I google a photo of the Giugiaro Parcour concept. We kick around the idea of something smaller and lighter than that.

“This is an opportunity to create a new visual identity for Lotus. Not what we had in the past, or the one Donato Coco did [for the five unborn Bahar-era cars]. It will be for the global SUV segment but owned by Lotus.”

Ah yes, another tangential mention of Lotus’s previous abandoned expansion plan. Surely Gales can see why Top Gear readers might say history has taught them to be skeptical when Lotus talks big talk?

“This isn’t about just cash and a few high-profile engineers coming to Hethel. It’s about global high-tech synergies. We now have an automotive giant on our side.” It will be a two-way street too: Gales insists Lotus has much to contribute to the group in light weight, aerodynamics and handing.

But we won’t see much for a while. He says there won’t be a rash of concept cars. He wants Lotus to reveal the new stuff one by one, when it’s good and ready.

Lotus began using Toyota engines with the Elise in 2004, and continues to do so to this day. That could change, however. Today, Lotus parent company Geely announced its intention to merge its internal-combustion engine development with Volvo to free up the Swedish brand to develop electric powertrains. In a press release, Geely said the internal-combustion and hybrid powertrains it's developing will find homes in all its brands, including Lotus.

A spokesperson for Lotus told Road & Track simply "we won’t expand upon this suffice to say that details of future product programs will be shared when we are ready to announce them. This includes our powertrain strategy." The spokesperson didn't offer when (or if) its Toyota engine supply agreement will end.

We know that Lotus is readying a new sports car based on its current chassis for next year as a sort of step between today's Elise, Exige and Evora and a range of totally new sports cars a few years away. It seems safe to assume that those future sports cars could receive Geely engines. For the foreseeable future, though, Lotus will likely stick with Toyota power, except in the upcoming Evija hypercar, which gets a 2000-hp electric drivetrain developed in concert with Williams Advanced Engineering.

Currently, Volvo only produces three- and four-cylinder engines, relying on forced induction and electric motors to offer V-6- and V-8-rivaling performance. Geely's engine lineup consists mainly of three- and four-cylinders, too, though its Emgrand GT sedan is offered with a 3.5-liter V-6.

Lotus fans shouldn't be scared by this news. As it's shown with Toyota engines—and the Rover K-Series four-cylinder in the first Elise—Lotus can do great things with rather ordinary-seeming powerplants. And if it ends up abandoning V-6s altogether, remember that the vast majority of Lotus's roadgoing models have used four-cylinder engines.

Currently, the cheapest Lotus you can buy in America is the $96,950 Evora GT. That's out of reach for most people, which is why the company is planning a new entry-level car to slot below it in the lineup. And it'll be the brand's last car powered by an internal combustion engine.

In an interview with Automotive News Europe, Lotus Phil Popham confirmed the car's existence, saying it will be priced between £55,000 and £100,000 (around $68,000 and $123,000)—well below the Evora's price range.

Popham said the car, which has yet to be named, will take design inspiration from Lotus's $2.5-million Evija EV hypercar, and be built in a new factory extension at the company's existing Hethel facility. It will have enough interior space for daily usage, according to the CEO. It will be revealed sometime between late this year and early 2021.

The new car is part of a plan to boost volume for the small British manufacturer from the current 1600 cars a year to around 5000 a year, with assistance from parent company Geely. Popham said future additions to the lineup could include a sporty sedan or SUV.

"Our focus now is on sports cars, but we do think the brand has the potential to move into other segments," Popham told Automotive News Europe."And Geely has expertise in areas such as electrification and autonomous driving."

Lotus is launching a new plug-and-play digital instrument cluster option for Elise and Exige V6 owners, offering a wealth of information with a focus on track-day driving.

The new digital cluster comes pre-loaded with more than 4,000 race tracks from across the world and features GPS and lap performance indicators, allowing drivers to measure, display, and record data from their track sessions.

The unit display is a six-inch high-contrast TFT screen and even features a camera input for plugging in your action camera to capture the action. The new Lotus Digital Instrument Pack is designed for the Elise and Exige V6 models, from 2008 onwards.

The unit even recognizes when you are near a circuit, with drivers able to download the start/finish coordinates to measure their lap times and analyze their performance, either in real-time on the display or later by downloading the data on a laptop.

“We know our customers appreciate the motorsport heritage of Lotus cars and love to use their own vehicles on track days,” said Chris Hinks, Aftersales Director, Lotus. “Integrating a Digital Instrument Pack into an Elise or Exige is only going to enhance that experience.”

The new digital instrument cluster fits seamlessly into the dashboard and is available for £1,470 in the UK market with a free fitting service also available. When fitted by an authorized Lotus retailer, the unit is covered by a two-year warranty.

Lotus is also launching a number of aftersales packages, including fixed-price scheduled servicing and on brakes and clutches.

Lotus Cars, the legendary British sports car maker now under Zhejiang Geely and Etika Automotive's guidance, has both good and bad news for 2021. According to the proposed business strategy, there’s more than £100 million (around $137 million) to be invested into brand new manufacturing facilities and the creation of new jobs to support upcoming production quota increases. On the other hand, the Evora, Exige, and Elise are also being phased out this year.
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No worries, because we’re dealing here with a clear case of the positive edging out the negative. That’s because Lotus Cars has also confirmed a completely new series of sports cars, with the first member of the “Lotus Type 131” family scheduled to kick off prototype production in Hethel later this year.

According to the company, its planned manufacturing investment is a major part of the new “Vision80” business plan. It will also include the decision to close a couple of smaller assembly facilities, as their activity will be moved into just one “efficient” operation in the city of Norwich.

Additionally, in tune with the £100 million investment in Hethel, Lotus will seek to increase its current workforce. The company needs another 250 employees for the engineering and manufacturing departments of both Lotus Cars and its consultancy subsidiary, Lotus Engineering.

The latter is also on the verge of opening a Warwick-based Advanced Technology Center later this year, but we’re obviously more interested in the promised developments with the teased “forthcoming family of performance cars.”

So far, Lotus has shared just one lonely image hinting at the “new generation of products that will follow Elise, Exige, and Evora, which have entered their final year of production in 2021.” We performed a little bit of Photoshop magic on the dark teaser, but at the moment, there isn’t much info to be shared on the development of the all-new Type 131.

Although we’re clearly dealing with three performance cars, they’re completely hidden under the wraps – so we can only distinguish the fact that each has a distinctive styling for the signature daytime LED running lights. It’s possible, though one should take this with a grain of salt, that we’re also dealing with separate front designs. No worries, soon enough we’ll know more.

Not one but three Lotus models will exit production at the end of the year as the automaker gets ready to overhaul its entire lineup, in one of the most important milestones for the company in this century. The Evora, Elise and Exige are all being out to pasture as Lotus gets ready to produce a new model, dubbed Type 131, entering production later this year.
If the three Lotus model names above seem like they've been around for a while, that's because the tenures of the Elise, in production since 1996, and the Exige that followed in 2000, were long even by Lotus standards. That's right: the Elise is older than DVD players and older than the Star Wars prequels, and has aged far better we're sure you'll agree when it comes to the latter item. The Evora, launched in 2008, is the youngest car in the lineup, but even that model is now more than a decade old.

Just what the Type 131 will actually be is still a bit of a mystery, even though we know it will feature a V6 engine paired with a hybrid system Lotus is developing itself. The Type 131 is expected to be a larger GT model of sorts that will more or less replace the Evora, but that's about all that's cautiously expected at the moment. Yet another model entering production later this year is the pure-electric Evija, meant to be a low-volume halo model for the brand. And it's the only one of the upcoming lineup that's been seen in detail.

The teaser image Lotus released above shows the Evija and three other models under wraps, all appearing to be coupes of different sizes. But Lotus has more than just coupes in the works, if you've been reading the company's tea leaves for a while.
Lotus isn't planning just one or two to replace the three exiting production later this year — a larger family of cars is in the works that will be quite diverse, including the long-planned crossover that had been seen in patent drawings some time ago. Lotus will also have the resources of Geely at its disposal, since the Chinese automaker best known for its Volvo brand purchased a majority stake in Lotus in 2017.

"This year will be hugely significant for Lotus with new facilities coming on stream, a new sports car entering production and new levels of efficiency and quality that only a new car design and factory can deliver," said Phil Popham, CEO, Lotus Cars. "Despite the continuing global challenges, Lotus has emerged from 2020 strong and on track in the delivery of our Vision80 business plan."

"As our Vision80 strategy illustrates, Lotus is all about looking forward, and our future is full of continuous innovation," he added. "In 2021, however, we will be reflecting on the legacy of our current range, starting with the Elise, a sports car that genuinely revolutionized the automotive industry, not only because it is a legend-in-its-own-lifetime but also for its impact on car design and technology."

It's a good bet that one of the new Lotus models will be an Elise replacement, staying true to the original's character, dimensions and weight of the original, which has managed to stay looking young over a quarter century on the production line. A larger GT is also expected to debut, playing the role of the Esprit in the lineup. An SUV is expected to follow in 2022 with a fully electric powertrain, tasked with being the range's volume model. The long-awaited SUV could be unveiled in late 2021 ahead of a 2022 launch.
"Our renowned team of engineers, designers and technicians who are working on the new cars are acutely aware of the legacy from the Elise, Exige and Evora," said Matt Windle, Lotus’ Executive Director, Engineering. "Indeed, many were around when Elise was being developed. Members of our team, old and new, are now busy blending the learnings of the past with the innovations of today and tomorrow, to ensure our future cars truly move the game on but remain firmly committed to Lotus values."

So 2021 will perhaps be the most important year for Lotus in the past 25 years, since the Elise's debut of the Elise. We're now in the final months of the outgoing lineup dating back more than a decade and are awaiting an entirely new lineup to take over, closing one chapter and opening another, one expected to take Lotus into a new age for the company.

Lotus took a big leap towards the mainstream with the announcement it's building four new EVs, and only one is a sports car. The others include a sedan and two SUVs. And on top of the new product announcements, the automaker revealed its Lotus Technology division is going to set up headquarters in Wuhan, China.

With the Elise out of the picture and its pockets full of cash from Geely – parent company to Volvo, too – Lotus is moving forward with its ambitious expansion plans. It announced it will grow its line-up of models with four electric cars shown in the sketch above: an SUV called Type 132 internally and due out in 2022, a sedan marketed as a four-door coupe known as Type 133 and expected to go on sale in 2023, a second SUV referred to as the Type 134 that will make its debut in 2025, and a sports car currently dubbed Type 135 that we'll allegedly see in 2026. This isn't the first time Lotus has made wild claims about its future, but this time it might actually have the funds to pull it off.

We knew that an SUV was in the pipeline, leaked patent images may have revealed its exterior design, but the sedan and the second high-riding model are new additions to the company's product roadmap. Lotus explained its so-called "premium lifestyle" vehicles (read: four-door models) will all ride on a new platform called Lotus Premium that's said to be highly modular. Its wheelbase can vary from about 114 to 122 inches, and it can take battery packs with a capacity of 92 to 120 kilowatt hours. It's also compatible with an 800-volt charging system, and Lotus claims vehicles built on the new architecture will be capable of reaching 60 mph from a stop in less than three seconds.

As for the other news, while Lotus ostensibly remains based in Hethel, England, its historic home, the Lotus Technology subsidiary broke ground on a new facility in China in August 2021. Lotus explained it formed the division to develop batteries and energy management systems, electric motors, electric control systems and other EV components.

Investing in Wuhan rather than in Hethel will certainly raise more than a few eyebrows. It's a move that brings Lotus closer to its parent company and some of its key investors, such as Nio, while pivoting it away from its historic home and its main markets. Surprisingly, the firm declared it shares many common interests with Nio (one of the carmakers hoping to become China's answer to Tesla) and hinted the two brands could explore potential areas of collaboration.

Lotus Technology will inaugurate its headquarters in Wuhan, China, in 2024, but that's not the only big investment in the area. Lotus is also building a $1.24 million factory in Wuhan that's scheduled to open later in 2021. The aforementioned "premium lifestyle" models will all come from Wuhan, the firm noted, and it sounds like they'll be sold around the world. America wasn't singled out in the announcement, but Lotus told Autoblog in 2020 that every new car in the product plan will be available globally.

If needed, the plant will be able to build up to 150,000 cars annually, which is an absolutely massive number in the grand scheme of things. For context, Lotus built around 55,000 units of the Elise, the Exige and the Evora, and that number represents over half of the production cars the company has built since its inception in 1948. Clearly, uprooting Lotus from the United Kingdom and planting it in China is a way to emerge from a niche and seek volume.

England won't be completely crossed out of the equation. The facility in Hethel will be responsible for developing and building sports cars, like the limited-edition Evija and — presumably — the Type 136 that we'll see during the second half of the decade. These are low-volume models; the core cars will all carry a "made in China" label.