A freshly flush Lotus Cars readies four new vehicle architectures

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  The Lotus Emira will be unveiled in early July, and it’s going to be the last new Lotus with an internal combustion engine. [credit: Lotus ]

Car enthusiasts have been wondering for a while now what’s next for Lotus Cars. The British carmaker is best-known for lightweight sports cars, but it’s probably nearly as well-known for being perennially broke. At least it was. In 2017, Geely bought the brand and its Malaysian parent company Proton, with the promise of reinvestment. And Geely has a track record in that regard—in 2010 it bought Volvo from Ford, then bankrolled it and stood back to watch as the Swedish OEM revitalized itself.

Well, wonder no more, for on Tuesday morning Lotus revealed its master plan. It’s preparing not one but four separate vehicle architectures, which it says will be exclusive to Lotus within the Geely group (which includes Polestar as well as Volvo) but available to other OEMs through the well-respected Lotus Engineering consultancy.

The first vehicle architecture, and probably least important, is called Extreme. We’ve actually already seen the first car that will use this hypercar platform: the Evija, a four-motor electric vehicle with 1,971 hp (1,470 kW) and a $2.1 million price tag to go with it.