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NEWS
Lotus's three-year revival plan
British sportscar specialist's Malaysian owner, DRB-Hicom, green-lights a three-year program to rejuvenate the ailing carmakerJust under three years ago, then-Lotus chief executive Dany Bahar had used the 2010 Paris motor show to outline a wildly ambitious plan to take on Ferrari and Lamborghini at their own game, unveiling no less than five new concepts at the French expo.
It’s now history that Bahar was sacked in June, 2012, while Lotus was seemingly left rudderless and headed for financial ruin.
However, the British carmaker’s owner, Malaysian conglomerate DRB-Hicom, has now signed off on a three-year revitalisation program that ostensibly involves investing in the continued evolution of Lotus’s existing product range – the Elise, Exige and Evora – and developing new derivatives of these models.
Although no specific details of the new strategy have as yet been announced, DRB-Hicom has confirmed that it has already spent more than $165m in keeping Lotus operational since taking over the company last year.
The rise in sales of Lotus cars during this period has allegedly convinced the Malaysian firm that continued investment would be worthwhile, and hence the latest initiative.
“We have cleaned up and we are moving ahead,” DRB managing director Tan Sri Mohd Khamil Jamil was quoted as saying in the Malaysian media.
“We are coming out with the variants based on existing products — variants with improved technology, improved performance, improved quality as well as improved costing,” he said.
The first of these has already been launched in the form of the hardcore Exige S, which packs a 258kW punch at a sub-$120k price.
Jamil also reiterated that the five-new-model proposal presented by Bahar at the 2010 Paris show had been officially canned.
However, according to British publication Autocar, the Esprit project was close to fruition when DRB took over and it speculates that it could be resuscitated at relatively little cost.
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Written byGautam Sharma
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