New Lotus sports car to be shown this summer

Lotus will show a new sports car this summer as the British company seeks to go from a niche brand to one with global appeal under the ownership of China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.

The model, which will have an internal combustion engine and come in a range of price points, could replace all of Lotus’s aging lineup: the 25-year-old Elise, the 21-year-old Exige (a more powerful derivative of the Elise) and the 12-year-old Evora. 

The car will go into production next year at Lotus’s revamped factory in Hethel, eastern England, Lotus CEO Phil Popham told Automotive News Europe in a telephone interview on Friday.  

Popham said the new model "will give us quite substantial growth."

Lotus sold 1,378 cars in 2020, a 4.4 percent increase from 2019.

The new car will be offered in versions ranging from 55,000 pounds ($75,000) to 105,000 pounds, Popham said. The price window broadly matches that of Lotus’s current lineup.

Popham discussed the new model in broad terms last April but did not provide a timeline for its launch.

Lotus is also seeking to begin deliveries of the Evija electric hypercar by year-end, Popham said.

The brand’s future plans including partnering with Renault Group’s Alpine brand to engineer an electric sports car platform to yield a new model in 2025, Alpine said. 

The new combustion engine sports car will broaden Lotus’s appeal in the United States, where it currently sells only the more upmarket Evora, Popham said. The U.S. is the brand’s second-largest market after Germany, with the U.K. third and Japan fourth.

"This car will have a wider price point, and that gives us an opportunity in the U.S.," he said. "To be successful in the sports car market you have to be successful in the U.S."

Popham said that future Lotus vehicles will be engineered with an eye toward global sales. "Any healthy business spreads its risk in terms of geographic coverage," he said.

Geely acquired Lotus from Proton Holdings in 2017 and announced it planned to expand the lineup. The company started construction of a plant in Wuhan, central China, in 2019 to build Lotus models that are not sports cars.

Lotus has said it will keep production of its sports cars, including the Evija, at Hethel, in England, leaving China to build new body styles. Popham has previously said an SUV or sedan is a possibility for the brand.

Lotus has worked to upgrade the Hethel manufacturing site to increase annual capacity to 10,000, giving it space to produce the new combustion engine sports car as well as the electric model developed with Alpine.

The new sports car will have a modern electrical architecture to allow for a higher degree of connectivity, Popham said. The platform has been redesigned to remove some of the practical disadvantages of the current one, such as a cabin that can be difficult to exit and enter. 

"There's real focus on usability," Popham said. "It's a car designed so you can live with it on a day-to-day basis."