Lotus Cars is no stranger to a crisis, but this time I’m not sure I want it to be saved.
If the Brit brand went under while producing soul-stirring semi-affordable lightweight sports cars, I’d light a candle (and a John Player Special) before overdosing on nostalgic Lotus YouTube videos.
But do I care if a company flogging a few hundred giant, heavy, luxurious and deeply unaffordable electric SUVs fails?
Not really, because so many other brands pretty much offer the same thing.
READ MORE: Spectacular sub-1000kg Longbow sports car set for 2026 to trump Tesla’s Roadster.
READ MORE: REVIEW: “Nothing, but nothing, to come out of China can touch the Lotus Eletre.”
READ MORE: Lotus Theory 1 is the 735kW EV successor to the lightweight Elise hero.
This isn’t an anti-EV rant. I reckon Lotus should make electric cars (alongside affordable ICE ones), but not the ones in its current inventory.
Lotus stands for many things, one being innovation in the face of adversity.
A lightweight, fun, fully electric sportscar desired (and ultimately bought) by driving enthusiasts. Now there’s a bloody tough nut to crack.
Lotus should have been pioneers here. It’s a mighty challenge, but just the sort of thing Colin Chapman would’ve embraced.
And somehow found a way to make it work.
Let me put it this way. Was anyone truly excited when Lotus revealed its Eletre electric hyper-SUV, or Emeya electric hyper-GT?
These are $200,000+ 2.5-tonne luxury-packed all-wheel-drive brutes with four or five doors, built in Wuhan in China, and if they didn’t sport a Lotus badge you’d have no idea of their origin.
Look, they’re not bad to look at and are bloody quick, but that’s not really enough these days, is it? So many EVs already tick those boxes.
I’ll tell you what did blow my skirt up this year. English startup Longbow promising the world’s first Featherweight Electric Vehicles (FEVs) with rear-drive Speedster and Roadster models weighing 995kg and 895kg respectively.
I’m not naïve. Many EV brands have promised much and delivered nothing, and this could go the same way. But Longbow’s team at least has solid engineering and business credentials.
And they want to deliver the cars Lotus should be making.
That means kerb weight under a tonne, 100km/h in less than four seconds, 400km+ EV range, two doors, two seats and power sent only through the rear treads. Personally, I’d love to try such a car.
Pricing them from a palatable ₤64,995 ($135,000) helps Longbow’s cause. Not least when Australia’s cheapest new Lotus is a $155,900 Emira – a car Lotus has stated will be its last ever combustion offering.
On another point, I love being blown away by mad, four-wheeled unobtanium, but did Lotus have to make the quad-motor 1500kW Evija?
It may blitz Nürburgring lap times and hit 300km/h in nine seconds, but a $3million EV vanity project is best left to brands with money in the bank account. You know, Porsche, Mercedes, Tesla, or even BYD.
Seeing an Evija X crash at 2024’s Goodwood Festival of Speed was a horrifying display of power corrupting. In this case, corrupting tyres and carbon aero bits as physics took over and the ultracar harpooned itself into the hay bales immediately post-launch.
Instead, wouldn’t it be savvy for Lotus to remove itself from this non-sensical pursuit of ever-more bonkers power numbers and 0-100km/h times?
There’s a gap in the market for affordable cars normal enthusiasts want to drive. If that can be an EV, all the better.
Prioritise driving enjoyment over power. Steering feel over fun-diluting tech. Make a car people will drive because they want to, not because they need to.
Sadly, recent history shows not enough people buy such funsters. We default to soulless SUVs.
Okay, Lotus has built SUVs, but they’re hardly helping its bottom line. Without wanting to sound like an after-timer, wasn’t it obvious the Lotus badge wouldn’t work on a lardy electric SUV anymore than it would on a diesel van?
And even with the might of megabucks Geely at the reigns, Lotus has just announced 550 job cuts at its Hethel HQ in England, while in June the Financial Times reported its UK base was set to close.
Lotus denied this, but admitted it was “exploring options” in efforts to stay competitive.
The brand had operating losses of $263million in the first half of 2025, globally shifting only 2813 cars: down 43 per cent over the first six months of 2024. Almost half of those sales were in China.
Lotus has sold 49 cars in Australia in the first eight months of 2025, only nine being EVs.
I’m not convinced things will improve. Not least when a few years ago the brand was targeting 150,000 annual global sales by 2028. That’s just not what Lotus is.
And where’s the electric successor to the dearly-departed Elise? Codenamed Type 135, it was mooted for a 2027 launch, and to my mind is integral to the brand’s survival.
Looks like the revealed concept Theory 1 is that car, and if so, that’s not the car it needs.
It’ll be an all-wheel-drive 1600kg electric coupe with hypercar performance and a price that’ll guarantee very low volumes.
Back in 1996 I’d just snared a driving licence, and Lotus launched its 87kW Rover-engined Elise which weighed just 725kg. It cost the same as a Ford Mondeo, making it just about obtainable to a young bloke if he got a decent job. I, and most of my car-mad mates wanted one more than anything Porsche or BMW were pushing out.
We loved the idea of this mythical British brand because Senna had not long ago been piloting a black and gold JPS F1 Lotus to race wins, while Roger Moore as 007 was picking up ski bunnies half his age in fat-tyred Esprit Turbos. Good times.
The Lotus badge still means something, so surely a focused, fun, affordable, light-as-possible electric sports car is more likely to save its bacon (as the Elise managed in the 1990s), and not mega SUVs and hypercars?
Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe Lotus and all it has traditionally represented simply can’t exist in this new era of electrification.
So then, barring some sort of miracle, the Lotus badge may survive only on overrated caramelised biscuits.
