Matt Prior TESTER’S NOTES
❝ Folk would buy Lotuses, if only it gave them a reason to do so
Things don’t happen fast. It took half a decade for Geely’s influence on Volvo to become evident, after the Chinese company bought the Swedish car maker in 2010.
But when the new XC90 landed in 2015, it became clear that Volvo and Geely were a pairing disinclined to mess about. The XC90 will be the oldest model in Volvo’s range in two years’ time. With advanced platform sharing and streamlined powertrains, Volvo is going places, fast. The mood is light, its staff are happy and the company is performing well. Last year it sold more cars than ever despite having an unfinished range, and the chances are that, by the end of the decade, it will sell 800,000 cars a year.
Don’t mistake modesty for a lack of ambition or direction, though. Volvo intends that nobody should be killed in its cars made after 2020 and is “quite sure” that diesels “cannot help us” once it needs to make cars that produce 95g/km of CO2 or less without high NOX figures.
And so to Lotus, of which Geely has just acquired a controlling stake. The adjectives ‘happy’, ‘energised’, ‘ambitious’ and ‘decisive’ are not ones I’d necessarily have applied to the Hethel employees I’ve met lately. It’s not that they couldn’t be all of those things, but with parent company Proton struggling, life is never going to be easy – which is why a lot of its engineers have moved elsewhere.
Lotus returned profits last year, true, but it was against a background of little investment and fewer staff than it needs to rebuild its range. Lotus is in desperate need of great new cars to sell: the Elise has been a stalwart, but it can’t be called on forever. It isn’t expensive enough to return big profits, either. The Evora is, but it isn’t nearly good enough.
So while Lotus has occasionally had money thrown at it, and usually had great engineers, it has always been short of something. Sometimes money, sometimes the leadership to make sure it builds cars people want, sometimes both. There is no shortage of car makers currently proving that if you make a desirable car with a desirable badge, people will buy it. And folk would buy Lotuses, if it only gave them a reason to do so.
What Lotus needs is the energy we’ve seen Geely give to Volvo; both the drive and the investment. I guess we’ll find out over the coming months whether Geely thinks it can afford to be as hands-off as it appears to have been with Volvo. But my guess is it’ll be a few years before we see how well that path has been steered. Hopefully, this time, everything will come good.
Ran into driving coach Rob Wilson at last week’s Autocar Awards and told him he’d been name-checked during commentary for Australia’s touring car series, the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship, formerly V8 Supercars.
I’ve signed up to watch Supercars this year (a season’s streaming is about £25) because I’ve been looking for a sport to follow. Supercars is it because the cars are exciting, there’s lots of overtaking, little whinging and close racing: in qualifying for the most recent round the top 21 were covered by less than a second. Wilson says why: typically the drivers are at least at Formula 2 levels of ability.