“It is sold out for the first three months, and could be sold out for six months by tonight.”
So says Jean-Marc Gales, the boss of Lotus, on the new Lotus 3-Eleven unveiled at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Its £82,000 price, unchartered territory for a Lotus, has got Festival-goers’ eyebrows raised, but Gales points to those early sales figures and the fact most people have gone for the yet more expensive £115,200 race version as a response. Someone even wanted to buy the model on the stand.
And, said Gales, we “haven’t yet seen the upper limit” for the cost of a Lotus.
The 3-Eleven, along with the Evora 400 he has just overhauled, are the windows into Lotus’s future under Gales, who joined the firm just over one year ago.
Gales spoke of the “good spirit in the company, the team spirit is back” that he now feels Lotus as the ethos of new models like the 3-Eleven “return us to the sources of where we’ve been”.
In other words, the 3-Eleven is, in Gales’ eyes, the embodiment of what a modern Lotus should be and will be in his tenure: more powerful and lighter than the model it replaces, and more practical and usable everyday to go with it. Sounds familiar from Lotuses of old. Simple, too, and, most importantly, achievable.
It’s a formula we’ll see repeated over the coming years, with replacements for the Exige and Elise confirmed by Gales as being in the works.
It’s always easy to be suspicious and knock a company like Lotus when it comes up with the latest new plan that might allow the company to do something other than lose money. Gales has, unlike his predecessor Dany Bahar, quite quickly into his tenure come up with tangible products that are already selling.
A Lotus SUV is also in the works, clearly a controversial product but Gales insists it will be built to the same Lotus formula, and cars like the 3-Eleven show “we’re not going soft”.
So to the balance sheet then, the real proof of the plan. This is when Gales, a real seven days a week man at Hethel, is at his most businesslike in our interview. He says the firm is on track to sell some 3000 cars in 2015, up from just over 2000 last year and around 1200 in 2013.
An expanded global dealer network is a big part of this. Lotus has 50 more dealers than this time last year, and another 20 planned this year. The revised Evora 400 is unashamedly aimed at boosting Lotus in North America, where the car has not been a success, and extra dealers are on board to sell it.
When will Lotus finally be profitable, then? “We will be cashflow profitable in this financial year, and profitable in the financial year beginning 1st April 2016 for the first time in 60 years. We’re basing new products on our strengths, why would we change it?”
As ever, life at Lotus is never dull. But, for once, there are finally now actions (and positive ones at that) to go with the words.
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