The company will pivot instead to Hyper Hybrid PHEVs with Lotus sports cars also in-line for an electrified drivetrain. The first Lotus plug-in hybrid will be the Eletre and will go on sale in the first quarter of next year, starting in China.
Hethel was to build a planned electric sports car when Emira production ended but lack of enthusiasm in the market forced Lotus to postpone to the car indefinitely. “Is the market ready for an electric sports car? I don’t really know the answer to that yet,” Lotus Europe CEO Windle told Autocar in May.
Windle had been pushing Geely to build more models in the Hethel plant, which assembled around 5000 Emiras last year but has a theoretical capacity for 10,000. One potential model was the specialist Polestar 6 electric roadster. “I think we could build it,” Windle said. “There’s an element of transition because at the moment it’s just ICE, but we’re going to have to go on that journey.”
Geely might have judged that Hethel wasn’t worth investing in further given that legislation would force the end of combustion engine cars, with the less climate-friendly US emerging as the last major combustion engine market on the planet.
Lotus CEO Feng has previously said that the company is assessing a V8 option for the Emira.
Lotus’s reset has come after the company dramatically over-estimated its growth. Ahead of its listing in New York in 2024, the company predicted it would be building 150,000 cars year by 2028, most from a new factory in Wuhan, China. A midsize SUV aimed at the Porsche Macan and codenamed Type 134 would deliver the bulk of sales when it launched in 2027. However the Type 134 was put on hold amid the EV slowdown and Lotus has struggled to build the momentum it needs to pay for the investment. Deliveries last year reached 12,134.
Closing Hethel would be a massive blow for the government, which earlier this week laid out its industrial strategy to help grow vehicle production to 1.3 million by 2035, up from 905,233 last year.
Lotus production is small compared to bigger players like JLR but the brand has survived in its Norfolk home since 1966, when Lotus founder Colin Chapman bought the former airfield from the government. Geely invested £100 million in the site, including a new sports car manufacturing facility that opened in 2022 to build the Emira.
One former senior Lotus executive called plans for closure “a disgrace”.