Yahoo Finance Lotus Planning Multiple SUVs, Because Why Stop at Just One?
The new parent of Lotus, Chinese automaker Geely, has ambitious plans for its British sports-car subsidiary, and we’ve already told you about some of them. Now a conversation with Geely’s design boss, Peter Horbury, at the recent Beijing auto show has revealed more substantial plans.
When Geely president An Conghui said he wanted to turn his new subsidiary into a rival for Porsche and Ferrari, we detected the pride of a new parent. But just six months later, plans are already advancing rapidly, with Horbury confirming that Geely will open a new design studio in the U.K. to help with the creation of a new generation of Lotus models.
“I can tell you that the ambitions for Lotus are greater than they were,” he said. “We see it as a possibility of building a whole brand, a whole group of products that carry the Lotus name, into areas the company hasn’t been in before. I think we’ve already mentioned the SUVs coming along, and we need a lot of resources to do this in a very swift time.”
The reference to plural SUVs shows that the plan has evolved since last year, when-just after the Geely acquisition-a company insider told us that the debate was over which of Volvo’s two platforms a Lotus SUV would use. Confirmation that there will be more than one means that issue might have been resolved by using both: the smaller Compact Modular Architecture (CMA) that underpins the XC40 and Geely’s Lynk & Co models, and also the larger Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) platform that sits under Volvo’s 60- and 90-series cars. Regardless, Horbury said, a Lotus SUV will need to have added lightness.
“An SUV is never going to be as light as an Evora or another Lotus,” he said, “but if you’re going to call it a Lotus then it has to be the lightest it can be of that genre. It’s going to be a challenge, but we’re very much looking forward to it-but I’m not the engineer, of course.”
Lotus design will continue to be headed from the U.K., at the company’s base in Hethel by Russell Carr, but Geely is set to open a new design studio near Coventry, about 100 miles away, which will be used primarily to help with Lotus’s new projects. Horbury confirms that the purchase of Lotus was the catalyst for starting a U.K. satellite studio that will operate alongside the brand’s other styling centers in Shanghai, Gothenburg, Pasadena, and Barcelona and will be equipped to build full-scale models.
“I could have expanded Gothenburg or Shanghai,” Horbury said, “but when Lotus came along I thought it was wise to maintain the creative work of Lotus in England. If we couldn’t expand Hethel with enough people to do all the projects, we’d better stay in England, within reasonable distance of there.”
The use of existing architectures means that Lotus is likely to bring its first SUV to market within three years, but replacing the brand’s aging range of sports cars is more of a challenge, since Geely does not have any existing platform that could support a mid-engined layout. In the near term, company insiders suggest that we will see a switch away from Toyota engines to Volvo power. Volvo’s turbocharged three-cylinder unit would be a perfect match for Lotus’s minimalist ethos. But when the next-generation sports cars do come, they could well move upmarket.
“The other thing we’re looking at is, where can Lotus be positioned,” Horbury said, “where it is today versus where the competition might be. China has proved a huge market for more luxurious, more expensive cars-that’s a possibility.”
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