Lotus Shoots for the Moon—and 150,000 Sales a Year

• Sports car maker plans to be building 150,000 cars a year by 2028.

• That’s a 2340% increase on last year’s global volumes.

• Three new Chinese-built EVs to transform brand’s fortunes.

Last month we told you about Lotus’s plans to float its Technology division on the NASDAQ ahead of the start of sales of its new range of EVs. Now we can put some more numbers of the scale of the brand’s future ambitions. And, spoiler alert, they are very ambitious indeed.

For perspective consider the fact that Lotus has never previously sold more than 5000 cars globally in a single year, and the company says that at no point in its 75-year history have more than a thousand of those come to the U.S. during one 12-month period. But with the arrival of the Lotus Eletre EV, plus the two models that are set to be built in the same plant in Wuhan, China, that is set to change dramatically. By 2028 Lotus is planning to be producing 150,000 of its new electric models each year in China, with around 50,000 of those coming to north America.

Which is why Autoweek grabbed some time with Lotus’s newly appointed Chief Commercial Officer Mike Johnstone at the Shanghai auto show to ask him how such a radical transformation is going to happen.

Lotus isn’t going to give up on making sports cars, with the eagerly anticipated Emira about to go on sale in the U.S., but they will obviously become a much smaller part of the business going forward.

“The relationship is effectively that Lotus cars [in the UK] is a manufacturer and supplier of sports vehicles, while the Wuhan factory creates our ‘lifestyle’ cars,” Johnstone says, “but we’re one brand. I’m passionate that within the organization we have to talk about and think about one brand. Lotus is global, it won’t matter where the product comes from or which market we’re in, we have to be one Lotus.”

The Eletre will be the first of the new-age Lotus products to reach the U.S., although we will have to wait until next year for it to arrive. Lotus insiders say that the process for Federal type approval still has to be undertaken, but that the first customers will be getting cars by the end of 2024. As with Tesla’s recent decision to supply some Model Y from Shanghai to China, the Lotus EVs reaching the States will all be Chinese-built—despite the need to pay a swingeing 27.5-percent import tariff to bring it in. One obvious way to reduce that would be to manufacture locally, as both Volvo and Polestar—part of the same Zhejiang Geely Holding Group which owns Lotus—have already committed to doing. But that isn’t planned for the moment.

“Our plan is based on exporting from China to the U.S., but we will definitely look at other ways in which we can do it,” Johnstone says, “and not just in the U.S., to be honest with you—there are other markets you could manufacture in that would help from a tariff point of view.”

Lotus is also committed to being a pioneer of higher-level autonomy, with the Eletre getting multiple LIDAR sensors to enable it to operate safely at speed. In China we’re told that it is already able to drive up to 200 km—125 miles—between the need for driver intervention. The company reckons that is broadly equivalent to Level 3 autonomy. But the target is rapidly to incrementally move that figure all the way up to 100,000 km, or 62,000 miles. As more permissive autonomy rules are introduced in the States, Lotus hopes to be able to immediately exploit them.