Can Lotus survive its latest crisis?

The news has broken that many insiders already feared: Geely is considering closing Lotus’s Hethel factory. Countless rounds of job losses over the last two years, the stop-start production of the Emira due to parts supply issue (the suggestion is that Lotus Cars hasn’t had the cash to pay for them) and the spectacular and financial failure of the Evija has resulted in Chinese owners Geely leaving nothing off the table when it comes to deciding the fate of the storied British manufacturer.

Since the original story broke via the Financial Times at the end of June, Lotus issued a statement within 24 hours: “Lotus Cars is continuing normal operations, there are no plans to close any factory.” It has the reassurance of the chairman of a football club backing their manager after a string of defeats. Before inevitably sacking them a week later. 

At the beginning of July Geely controlled Lotus Technologies, the New York stock market listed company, acquired the 49 percent Etika Automotive still held in Lotus Cars to take full control of Lotus UK.

That the design and engineering teams are little more than a skeleton staff and the production line is barely running suggests that clearly all is not well at Hethel with Geely taking sole responsibility for the brand. Some sources even suggest the issues for Geely go beyond Lotus Cars, with Volvo and Polestar facing increasing market pressures around the low sales of electric vehicles.

Under Geely ownership Hethel was to be the home of Lotus sports cars, with its Wuhan factory responsible for the company’s electric cars, the Eletre and Emeya. 

Investment hasn’t been in short supply. A new production hall and all the ancillaries required were built for the battery powered Evija hypercar. When Elise, Evora and Exige production finally came to an end their production halls were thoroughly overhauled and updated to leading 21st Century facilities, including another new production hall integrated for the Emira. They even laid new Tarmac in the car park. Hethel was finally fit for 21st Century car production. Unfortunately, it seems Lotus wasn’t.

The Emira launched to great fan fare. Jenson Button pulled the covers off, people queued at the Lotus stand at the Goodwood Festival of Speed to place deposits. It looked sensational. It would be affordable - £85,000 for the V6, circa £60-65,000 for the 4-cylinder AMG engines version. Look out Porsche!

Lotus had a car people wanted. The question now would be: could Hethel keep up with demand?

Of course it could, but sadly not because of the sizable production capacity now available in its new factory. Rather, Lotus was struggling to build what is, when broken down to its constituent parts, a rebodied Evora with a new interior. 

Customers grew tired of waiting, more grew tired of the shocking service from Lotus. What started as a buying experience that made depositors feel like Kings and Queens quickly became a customer service mess. Emails and phone calls went unanswered, dealers had no more insight than customers so, understandably deposits were pulled. The Emira was late. And around £10,000 more expensive than Lotus said it would cost.

When it did arrive it still wasn’t quite ready. The first test cars handed over to the press in 2022 came with a sheet of A4 paper highlighting any discrepancies each test car might have due to them being ‘early production cars’. The V6 evo was sent to test came equipped with the optional Sport chassis but the lower spec Goodyear tyres of a car with a Tour chassis. The ABS and stability control systems were also ‘not optimised’ and we were asked ‘please don’t crash it because we’re not sure the airbags work and take a 10mm spanner with you in case you need to disconnect the battery to turn it off and on again’. And when we track tested it at Anglesey they could only provide part-worn tyres as spares. No wonder the lad sent to come and fix the car when it stopped working arrived in his own Cayman rather than a spare Emira: “I needed to get here.”

Three years and a month to when we last drove an Emira V6, we’ve driven another (you can read about it in the August issue of evo available Wednesday July 9), and while there was no requirement to bring our own tool kit, it still felt unfinished. It was also only a ‘First Edition’ model that’s no longer available to buy, rather than the latest SE or Racing Line models.

> Lotus has launched a new flagship Emira, and it starts from almost £100k

The four-cylinder AMG engined Emira that followed felt like a much better, more resolved car. It lacks the noise and theatre of the Toyota V6 and a manual gearbox, but the turbocharged four and paddleshift gearbox suit the car so much better. It was late to market, too. We drove one and really liked it, to the extent that it felt it would give an Alpine A110 more of a challenge than a Porsche Cayman. We’ve still not been able to prove this because as soon as it was launched the four-cylinder cars pretty much disappeared. The Mercedes engine Lotus had originally used went out of certification due to Lotus focussing on getting the V6-engined models to customers and would therefore have to wait until the updated unit was available. Now it is and the four-cylinder Emiras it’ll be fitted to will be called the Turbo and SE. I genuinely hope we’re able to test it and customers buy it.

The Emira is a good car. Class beater? Not quite, but both the Cayman and A110 are remarkable and as a trio they offer three bespoke personalities on a sports car. 

The Evija, on the other hand, should never have left the ideation meeting. Whatever was Lotus thinking? A company known for lightweight, compact sport cars that borrowed engines from humble manufacturers to power their sensational sports cars thought it could build a seven-figure priced hypercar. This wasn’t what it needed. Not then. Not ever. These £2m, 2000bhp cars are follies. Wreckless corporate vanity projects that do irreversible damage. When Porsche quietly sidelines its offering, Mission X, you know there’s no market for them.

The possibility that Hethel might now close and with it take 1300 jobs out of the local economy is sadly easy to understand when you take emotion out of the equation and look at the numbers. In the first quarter of 2025 Lotus delivered 555 sports cars, a 52 percent drop on the year before. 

> A hybrid Lotus Emira could be on the cards

For the full year 2024 Lotus delivered 5,272 sports cars (12,134 if you include the electric models) with North America deliveries finally starting, but that bubble appears to have already popped. Factor in the barren start to quarter two due to America's to and fro on tariffs and even if our friends across the Atlantic went into overdrive, Emira sales for 2025 are going to be around half the number of the previous year. With Chinese car buyers also non-plussed about the Eletre and Emeya, Lotus’s cash in doesn't get close to the cash going out the door.

Hethel can’t survive on such low volumes. Lotus, or rather Geely, can’t justify plugging the financial hole this causes. Then again, neither could a rumoured US factory, or rather Lotus using Volvo’s South Carolina factory to build Eletre and Emeyas and whatever they call the reversed engineered plug-in hybrid models based on these two battery electric vehicles. The Lotus ship has sailed, and there’s no cars on it. 

Geely buying Lotus was never going to transform it into Porsche, but it should have provided it with a strong foundation to be the best at what it does best – engineering and building innovative cars and schooling the best engineers along the way. Lotus is a specialist. It should have been the opportunity to blend the alchemy of Lotus Engineering with the intuition of Lotus Cars to create low volume products customers would pay a high price for. 

In the latter years there have been far too many middle-aged men on the Lotus payroll wearing oversized glow-white trainers spending more time signing leases on city centre vanity showrooms than understanding the business they are paid handsomely to operate in. 

Lotus has always sailed too close to the wind, but it seems the storm has finally taken out Hethel.