Exclusive: Lotus CEO Outlines Plan to Save the Brand with Fa

[Coen]

Lotus doesn’t have a stand at the 2014 Paris auto show, but its newly appointed CEO Jean-Marc Gales was in attendance, so we took the opportunity to grab an interview about his plans for the future of the brand. It’s been a baptism of fire for Luxembourg-born Gales. Even a résumé that includes Peugeot Citroën, GM, Mercedes, and Volkswagen little prepares him for the unique challenges faced by Lotus.

This Paris show marked the fourth anniversary of when previous Lotus boss Dany Bahar unveiled his ambitious (and subsequently proven pure-batshit) scheme to launch five all-new models by 2016. The strategy unraveled dramatically, nearly taking Lotus down entirely and leading to Bahar’s acrimonious departure.

Last month, Lotus announced plans for aggressive cost-cutting, with up to a quarter of its workforce targeted for layoffs. Shortly after, we broke the news that—due to the expiration of its smart-airbag exemption—there won’t be a 2015 Evora in the U.S. market. Lotus responded with an official statement that the car will be brought back in 2016.

So, will there be a gap in sales? Although the company won’t confirm how many cars are on this side of the Atlantic, Gales insisted there is enough inventory of ’14-spec Evoras to meet demand until the new model arrives. He did admit that they could sell out if demand rises, “but that would make me a happy man.”

Gales confirmed earlier speculation that the 2016 Evora won’t just be the current car updated with federally compliant smart-airbag technology, but will get a major package of revisions to sharpen its case against newer, faster rivals.

“We are staying with the existing Evora but making it better,” Gales says. “We made it better by making it faster; secondly, there were practical things that were on the list of improvements, like making it easier to get in and out of the car. Thirdly, we have an interior that looks different to the current interior, that has been changed in most parts.”

Gales aims to sell 500 Evoras in the States in 2016, part of his drive to take total Lotus global production to 3000. (For context, the company sold 1200 cars worldwide last year, with the U.S. volume of 264 cars ranking third behind Japan and the U.K. and just ahead of Germany.) That’s a dramatic increase—but not one that is going to justify the costs of engineering any all-new models in the medium term. Instead, Gales admits that everything Lotus will be doing for the next few years will be spun off its existing bonded-aluminum architecture.

“The major trends in car design are aluminum, lightweight, and efficiency,” Gales said. “The Evora has a lot of life left in it, and we are actively thinking about getting derivatives from that platform—body derivatives, variants that we can do, models that will come to the market in the next two to three years.”

First, we’d bet on an Evora roadster, an obvious gap in the current model range. Beyond that, faster derivatives of all the current Lotus lineup seem certain.

“The whole concept of our cars is extremely modern,” Gales insisted. “The Alfa 4C that’s just been launched has a carbon tub that’s barely eight pounds lighter than our 17-year old Elise tub . . . If you drive the cars, of course you [see that you] can improve them. We are going to make them even lighter, even more precise, faster. We are going to make sure they are easier to live with in daily life, easier to get in and out of.”

Interestingly, Gales says it is possible to make significant changes to the current platform, including altering major dimensions, wheelbases, and even the size of the vast sills that have made it such a struggle to clamber in and out of Lotus’s modern products. And that’s for people wearing pants. No one wearing a dress has made a graceful exit from a Lotus since the Esprit was axed.
The other constant, for the short-term at least, will be Toyota-sourced engines. Gales says there’s more power to be had from the supercharged V-6 that propels both the Evora and Exige, although he refused to be drawn into specifics. Today’s maximum output is about 350 horsepower, but Gales is happy to go on record saying that future Lotus models will be able to match brawnier rivals. “There will be nothing faster on-track than these cars—and nothing more fun.”

2014 Lotus Evora S

We’re definitely not going to see any development of the V-8 engine that Lotus started working on under Bahar’s watch. “There were never any prototypes of the five cars shown four years ago,” Gales says. “There were never any engines on the test bed of that era. I don’t like to look back, but let it be said that they were very far away from production status. The current engine has a lot of potential left in it. I believe it’s a very modern concept: The whole world is going toward turbocharger, supercharger, and smaller-displacement engines.”

Beyond the short-to-medium term, the crystal ball gets considerably cloudier, by Gales’s own admission. There are thoughts of building front-engined models spun from Proton architecture. Lotus has its own engineering subsidiary, which works both for the company and for other automakers, but sources inside Hethel indicate that many of the proposed layoffs are likely to fall there. Moving forward, Gales intends Lotus Engineering to concentrate on working for Lotus and parent company Proton, concentrating its third-party efforts in lightweight technology and boosting efficiency. Getting investment to develop all-new Lotus models is going to rely on the strategy of evolving the existing cars proving itself. And Gales explicitly refuses to confirm that Lotus Cars would be profitable at his target production of 3000 cars a year.


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But overall, Gales projects confidence. “Forgive me for citing a competitor, but the Porsche 911 has been the same basic concept for 50 years. It’s been developed, redeveloped, enhanced—that’s what we’re going to do with our platform. It’s modern, it’s ours, and many people want something similar. Most successful sports cars in history are evolutions of what’s gone before.”

Bron: http://blog.caranddriver.com/exclusive- ... egal-cars/

[co-driver]

http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/indus ... marc-gales