Requiem for the Purists – Lotus Announces China-Built Electric SUV
By Edward A. Sanchez – Aug. 31, 2021
For a while, it was a badge of honor for sports car brands to proudly boast that they didn’t have an SUV in their lineup, nor planned to. Yet one by one, each of them succumbed to the overwhelming market pressures demanding a vehicle with at least some semblance of utility to be part of their offerings. Today, you can add one of the last holdouts of the pure-play sports car brands to that list: Lotus.
Now part of the global Geely empire (which owns Volvo and Polestar as well), the announcement of the future SUV model also came with the announcement that Lotus was going to open a factory in Wuhan, China, to build the new Type 132 SUV, as well as other future Lotus EV models.
Those wistful for the “good old days” of tweed caps and jackets and the Sunday morning drives in vintage MGs and Spitfires, well – if you have the means to keep one of those old classics on the road, enjoy the nostalgia. Today, both MG and Lotus are Chinese-owned, and even Jaguar is owned by Indian conglomerate Tata.
The old, defiant gearhead enthusiast in me would have ripped my shirt and mourned the turn of events that led to a Lotus SUV. But once Porsche capitulated to market pressures by bringing out the Cayenne in 2002, and being richly rewarded for it, I can’t blame other brands for following suit. If building a few trucklets means being able to also build a few canyon carvers or track toys still, I’m all for it.
Even as part of the announcement of the Type 132 and Type 134 SUVs, comes the announcement of the Type 135 sports car coming in 2026. If anything gives me hope in this whole turn of events, it’s that Lotus has been synonymous with masterful engineering and suspension tuning for decades, and has had a laser-focus on driving dynamics. If Geely management is smart, they will continue to let the Lotus engineers in both China and the U.K. continue to focus on this core strength, and not make them capitulate to the pressures of becoming a large-volume mainstream brand.
In addition to the announced Lotus SUV, of the three other electric vehicles coming in the next five years, teaser images indicate one will likely be a crossover.
The old paradigm of the four pillars of the automotive industry being firmly anchored in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Japan is long gone. Corporate ownership of car brands is now a truly multinational game, and will likely continue to be. Pure-play sports car brands are extremely rare, and if they even do exist, are now usually part of a larger corporate entity.
I now accept that having an SUV of some sort in your product lineup is just the cost of doing business for anything other than an ultra-niche boutique brand. My only hope is that the Lotus SUVs aren’t just cynically rebadged Volvos or Polestars, and offer truly exceptional driving dynamics that the brand has made its name on. Lotus is dead. Long live Lotus.
(Images courtesy Lotus)
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