INSIDE HETHEL’S NEW PRODUCTION HUB
Your overwhelming impression from standing for the first time in Lotus’s magnificent new Emira assembly hall at Hethel is that, for the first time, this really is a firmly founded long-term sports car business.
Hethel has been responsible for 55 of Lotus’s 73-year production history, but there has always been an undercurrent of impermanence brought by organisational changes and hiatuses from weak sales. But this place, and the mighty three-tier paint shop beside it, has clearly been built by planners looking 20 years ahead.
Wandering the new hall with Carl Elston, executive director of quality, it’s impossible not to be impressed by the scale of the thing. Bodies emerge from a framing line next door into a spacious four-line assembly process where they travel on AGVS (automatic guided vehicles). Chassis parts come from a new Lotus facility outside Norwich; powertrains arrive built up on pallets. At present, there’s a 17-minute cycle time and the factory is on one shift as it produces the last pre-production cars. Soon it will start on £75,000 Emira First Editions.
The production cycle time will get shorter as practice improves, says Elston, and two shifts a day are possible. This is the factory that will build Lotus’s upcoming electric sports car three or four years away, and maybe even the promised Alpine spinoff. The future looks exciting, but this is already a deeply impressive place with pervading optimism fully up to usual Lotus standards. But this time there’s no sign of a wing and a prayer.