A 1,000bhp petrol supercar from Lotus, reviving the Esprit name? Of course i'm excited
After years of struggles, editor Paul Barker thinks the future of Lotus is starting to look a little more rosy
Lotus is a brand that elicits so much goodwill. It would be lovely to see a firm that has produced so many iconic sports cars get back on track after spending the past couple of decades and more stumbling from one crisis to the next under a variety of owners.
Even Geely, the Chinese parent company that has made a pretty successful job of Volvo, has struggled to plot a path for Lotus in the nine years it has owned the Norfolk-based firm. Staff culls followed the failure of the Vision 18 plan, devised in 2018 to build 150,000 cars a year by 2028. Last year, numbers were well below 7,000.
I’ve been around long enough to have seen several ambitious Lotus plans fail, most notably at the 2010 Paris Motor Show where, under the ownership of Malaysian brand Proton, then-boss Dany Bahar unveiled five new cars as part of a “complete remake of the brand”. It was a bold showing designed to illustrate Lotus’s exciting future. Not one ever got close to production.
Now the company has a new strategy, and maybe this will be the one to finally give Lotus a brighter future. It certainly feels more humble and realistic, with an aim to build 30,000 cars annually and embrace hybrid powertrains, rather than rely on the transition to EVs to underpin its future.
A new, near-1,000bhp petrol supercar is obviously exciting, and the teaser image the firm has revealed is a good start from a styling perspective. But it’s only ever going to be a halo model – hopefully a good one, if Lotus has managed to hold onto enough of its engineering excellence through the turbulent recent years – and the big volume is going to be in more affordable and sensible cars.
Lotus fans may not like the electric Eletre SUV and Emeya four-door GT, but widen the powertrains to embrace hybrids – as Lotus has announced with the Eletre X – and they could gain enough traction to make the whole thing start to make sense. Revamping the Emira two-seater would at least give a boost to the lightweight sports car that purists believe Lotus should focus on completely.
Despite being under Chinese ownership, a buoyant Lotus would be a lovely British success story. We’ll be among the many people rooting for it, hoping that the latest plan for the manufacturer might actually be the one that works.
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