From Yahoo Finance, May 14:
Lotus 'first-mover advantage' brings Chinese-made cars to Canada; hybrids, V8 supercar coming, CFO says
English niche automaker Lotus, owned by China's Geely for nearly 10 years, is changing things up with its Focus 2030 game plan, nixing its all-EV future for one with 'mixed powertrains.'
Lotus is the latest automaker to walk back its all-electric ambitions, a move that is typically a painful setback. But the niche British automaker may have received a boost from a new trade deal.
Lotus, founded in 1952 in England as a small sports car maker and owned by China’s Geely (0175.HK) since 2017, announced a strategic reset that it calls Focus 2030. Lotus will shift from an all-EV future to one focused on a “mixed powertrain lineup” featuring hybrid-powered gas cars and EVs.
The announcement came alongside the news that Geely had shipped 18 Lotus Eletre electric SUVs to Canada, becoming the first automaker to export China-made EVs to that market under a new trans-Pacific trade deal.
Lotus spent much of the past four years building out a full EV portfolio — the Eletre SUV, Emeya GT sedan, and $2 million-plus Evija hypercar — and positioning itself as a high-performance electric brand. Its current gas-powered sports car, the well-regarded Emira, would eventually be phased out.
But uneven demand for expensive EVs forced a new plan. Focus 2030 keeps all current vehicles in the lineup, adds new powertrains to those cars, and introduces new vehicles, aiming for a 60-40 split in favor of plug-in hybrids over pure electrics.
“It’s just a strategic transition. It’s a reflection of the market demand,” Lotus CFO Daxue Wang said in an interview with Yahoo Finance, adding that eventually he sees “full electric mobility” coming, but didn’t say when that would be....
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