Electric
All-electric Porsche Taycan rival will be revealed later this year, and a smaller EV SUV plus an EV sports car will arrive before 2028
Lotus may have only sold 567 cars worldwide last year, but it has very grand plans for the future. In fact, as part of something it calls the ‘Vision 80’ strategy, it plans to sell 150,000 cars per year by the time it turns 80 years old in 2028.
Let us repeat that. That was 567 cars in 2022 and plans for 150,000 cars per year from 2028 onwards. Serious ambitions.
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Things seem to be on track, though. The combustion-engined Emira is now available with both four and six-cylinders, and the Eletre SUV is finally reaching European shores after first deliveries to customers in China took place in March this year.
“We now have 17,000 orders for Emira and Eletra combined for the first half of this year, worldwide,” Niels de Gruijter, executive director of Lotus Cars Europe, tells TG. “We are starting to deliver on the ambition.”
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Niels also tells us that three new markets (Austria, Denmark and Luxemburg) will be in play from next month. Oh, and that the all-electric four-door GT saloon car thing – currently codenamed the Type 133 – is finished. Big news.
“The sedan is finished,” says de Gruijter. “The design is signed off and we're now finishing the whole process. Later this year the car will be revealed, and then sales will start in the course of next year. So that's really going in the right direction.
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“The 150,000 cars will be every year after 2028. And that will be the Emira, the Eletra, the bigger sedan, a smaller SUV and the sports car that is coming.
“They will all be here by 2028. We didn’t come here to lean back and enjoy the ride. We’re here to steer the ship and make it happen.”
Ah yes, we should mention that all-important electric sports car too. We now know that the memorandum of understanding that was signed with Alpine is no longer a thing, but Lotus has already released a sketch of its future EV sports car.
“Like every product, it is very important to get it right,” says de Gruijter about the car currently known as Type 135. “Every single product that we're launching needs to be right, but Lotus is a sports car brand, so we need to have a sports car in our portfolio, and we will always have sports cars.
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“From a brand point of view that car is extremely important. It will be a completely new design.”
That new design remark is rather important, because TG understands that while the Eletre, the four-door saloon and the future smaller SUV will all share the same Electric Premium Architecture (EPA) platform, the Type 135 sports car will get its own construction.
A Lotus spokesperson said: “Think of it as an Emira replacement. But it's an all-new product built on an all-new platform from the ground up. It’ll be a pure electric platform and one that’s brand-new, not something that has been modified. It is being designed, engineered and built at Hethel because that is the home of Lotus sports cars.”
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August 01, 2023 at 04:00PM
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