Lotus Operandi
Car and Driver|May 2022
As always, the tiny British carmaker has ambitious plans, but a major investment from Chinese giant Geely means this time they might happen.
Jamie Kitman
Lotus Operandi

Increasing profits is the goal for Matt Windle, managing director of Group Lotus since January 2021. He's presiding over an explosion of new products and a well-funded future made possible by the deep pockets of Geely. The Chinese giant has pumped more than $3 billion into the plucky but chronically underfunded British sports car and racing marque. Lotus has said goodbye to standard-bearers-Elise, Exige, Evora over the past few years and next plans to fire off new products, including its first SUV, like Steph Curry on a three-point tear.

Launching as you read this, and due in America this fall, is the Emira, which the company calls its last gasoline-powered car. Coming “late in the second quarter, early third quarter,” according to Windle, is the oft-delayed Evija, a near-2000-hp electric hypercar with a price tag of more than $2 million-an edition so limited it skirts import regulations by qualifying as “show and display only.” Then, in the not-too-distant future, expect a series of more affordable electric sports cars based on the company's new aluminum-intensive platform. The so-called light electric vehicle architecture (LEVA) aims to move the goalposts from what the Elise's groundbreaking chassis did back in the 1990s. Substantially lighter-lightness being Lotus's raison d'être since its founding by Colin Chapman almost three-quarters of a century ago—the Evija's rear structure tips in with 37 percent less mass than the Emira's. LEVA will underpin a range of sports machines of different sizes, with batteries stacked vertically behind the driver or laid out horizontally, skateboard-style.

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