Lotus SUV on horizon as Australian operation boosted

The boss of Lotus Australia says he is determined to make the British sports car maker a proper player in this market, as dealerships expand across the country and new product such as sports SUV are tipped to be delivered into local showrooms within three years.

In 2016, Lotus polled its lowest sales in 15 years with just 31 units sold as the beleaguered brand switched distributors from Ateco Automotive conglomerate to Sydney’s independent Simply Sports Cars dealership (which had long been the brand’s top-selling dealer anyway).

Sales doubled to 62 in 2017, however, and the new team are targeting 100-plus by 2019 – higher than the record 90 achieved in 2007. It’s still small biscuits compared with Porsche, but Lotus Australia chief operating officer Richard Gibbs has declared that new Chinese owners, Geely, are preparing for an investment injection into new product likely including an SUV. And if Geely sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve done solid work with Volvo.

“We’d be hoping to hit out 100-plus cars somewhere around the year 2019,” Gibbs tells MOTOR.

“It’s always been the view that it’s a three-year hard work plan to get us to a point where the Lotus now is there on the shopping list of potential vehicles to buy from. I really don’t think it was there two to three years ago. It disappeared off everyone’s radar. Our biggest challenge was, and always was going to be getting people to take the brand seriously again.

“We are confident, based on the communications that are coming to us, that we are going to see some new product in the coming years. We are thinking it’s probably a couple of years away.”

That will likely include a Porsche Macan-rivalling medium SUV, Gibbs says, although he is clear that such a model from Lotus must have a focus on light weight and the racetrack.

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The Lotus APX concept was revealed in 2006, but unsurprisingly never made it to production.

“There are a lot of Lotus owners at the moment towing their cars around on trailers behind other brands’ SUVs and I’m sure if they feel the Lotus is a viable option, they are quite happy to tow behind a Lotus,” he says of the local potential.

“There is certainly a high degree of interest within the existing community. As to the market, whether the market can cope with another SUV coming in, I guess we would just look to the broader market trends and statistics and attitudes at the moment, and at the moment there doesn’t seem to be any let-up at all in the appetite for SUVs.

“It should do well … if they get it fit-for-purpose, definition-correct.”

A new Elise, Exige and Evora are then also tipped to follow by the early 2020s.

Lotus currently has one dealership in each of the five mainland states only, but a new Simply Sports Cars dealer in Melbourne will open this month to complement the Zagame operation in nearby Richmond.

Of course the British brand has had several infamous mis-starts, most recently a 2010 Paris motor show plan to develop five new models that never eventuated. Gibbs points to what Geely has done with Volvo, though, and tells us to watch this space.

“You don’t do that sort of stuff [buy-out] unless you plan to do something with it and grow and benefit from it,” he adds.