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Actualité Lotus 
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Inscrit le: Lun Sep 13, 2010 3:37 pm
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
Teasing pour le salon de Shangai sur le site Lotus, je suppose donc qu'ils vont présenter quelque chose la bas?


Ven Avr 12, 2019 12:25 pm
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
Roulement de tambours :))


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Lun Avr 15, 2019 10:18 am
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
Electric Lotus story in The Times today



In Shanghai later today, the Lotus will flower once more. After years of driving up blind alleys and running out of gas, Lotus Cars will use China’s premier motor show to unveil plans for a £1 million-plus all-electric hypercar. It will be both a statement of intent and the basis of a seven-year plan that aims to put the forgotten heritage brand of British sports cars back on a par with the likes of Aston Martin and McLaren.

Only a very few of the new hypercar — codenamed Type 130 — will ever be made, but it will be, in the argot of the industry, “a halo car”, a top-of-the-range benchmark that will provide the design cues for a new generation of Lotus sports cars, the first new models in a decade that will begin production in 2020 and that also will come in electric and hybrid variants.

We have been here before. At the 2010 Paris Motor Show, when the rest of the automotive industry was in recession, Dany Bahar, then the chief executive of Lotus, unveiled five new models, apparently backed by the UK government, to create 1,000 jobs. The rest of the industry laughed. The project was shelved. Mr Bahar left the company.

The question for Lotus’s legion of enthusiasts is: will this time will be any different? A well-funded owner in Geely, the most western-facing of China’s big automotive groups, and the promise of $2 billion investment in Lotus to 2025 suggests that it might. As does access to the Chinese car-buying market, the largest in the world, where the likes of Lotus and Aston Martin have not played.

Lotus also has a new chief executive — Phil Popham, 53, who was poached to head the project last autumn. He was one of a clutch of senior British executives behind the renaissance of Jaguar Land Rover before quitting in 2014 to run Sunseeker, the Dorset-based, Chinese-owned maker of superyachts. He was lured back on to dry land at Lotus with the promise of a big chequebook from Geely, which has already turned around the likes of Volvo and the Coventry-based London black cab manufacturer now called LEVC.

“We are, if you like, a 70-year-old start-up,” Mr Popham said ahead of the Shanghai Motor Show, referencing both the legacy of Lotus’s postwar founder Colin Chapman but also its decline into an automotive bit-part player. “We are a famous UK brand, but we are a small company. The awareness of Lotus is high, but familiarity with our models is low.”

Awareness remains high because of the legacy of its grand prix successes and six Formula One construction successes with Emerson Fittipaldi, Graham Hill and Jim Clark at the wheel. And because, like Aston Martin, it got his cars into James Bond films. But all of this was 40 years ago.

“Lotus hasn’t done anything for quite a while because it has not had the funding, nor the resources,” Mr Popham said. “We want to take the brand back to where it was and take it to where it could be. We are now on a brand-building exercise and the launch of the hypercar is part of that. We need to be aggressive and we will go through an abnormal amount of brand spending. At the moment Lotus is still a brand for enthusiasts.”

Volvo offers a template. Geely acquired Lotus from its previous Malaysian owners in the summer of 2017. “Geely knew with Lotus it was buying a brand with equity. Volvo is the example of what can be done, a sustainable and global brand which is still very much a Swedish brand. Lotus is a very British brand.”

It is also a loss-making and low- volume brand: £16 million in the red in the nine months to December 31, having lost £50 million in the two previous years; and sales of only 1,630, roughly a quarter of the production levels of Aston Martin and McLaren, though still its best effort since 2011. It makes only three models at its factory in Hethel in the Norfolk countryside. The Evora, Elise and Exige retail at between £45,000 and £75,000.

At Hethel work has begun on creating a new assembly line that from 2022 will begin to produce a stable of electrified Lotus sports cars with the intention of the company still playing in that sub-£100,000 sports car market. It has been hiring talent from other British manufacturers, such as Aston Martin, Jaguar Land Rover and Bentley. The new cars also will address what Mr Popham calls the barriers to purchase, including “ingress and egress” issues — a 6ft 4in man like him can have problems getting in and out of a Lotus.

Inevitably, decisions will have to be made about whether Lotus stretches the brand to compete in the 4x4 market, along with the Tesla Model X, or in luxury tourers, such as the Bentley Continental. According to its boss, the company “could, but any vehicle must have that Lotus DNA of driving dynamics, the handling, the performance, the appeal”.

The immediate plan is to stop haemorrhaging cash and then to take annual production to above 5,000 units a year. That will mean a second plant, perhaps at Hethel, maybe elsewhere in the UK, or in China. Nevertheless, Hethel will remain the spiritual home of Lotus, with Geely giving the green light to a heritage centre, an homage to Chapman and the F1 years, and a Lotus experience facility allowing access to the factory’s much-envied two-mile test track.

Today Lotus will provide only “tease” images of its new hypercar before showing it in final form later in the year. “It will be a showcase, and a reminder, of our capabilities and our engineering,” Mr Popham said, “and it will demonstrate that we are well-funded. It will be about making a statement.”


Lun Avr 15, 2019 11:37 am
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
C’est donc la fameuse hypercar électrique :|
Ça ne concernera pas trop :D


Mar Avr 16, 2019 9:15 am
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
Pistonheads a vu l engin dans son état actuel.
Effectivement perso, électrique, hyper ou pas ca me passionne pas, mais c est une auto faite pour qu on parle de Lotus , vu les budgets que ca implique ça mais peu de doute sur la crédibilité des chinois.
Qu ils feront des autos qui m intéressent ...c est pas sure du tout , qu ils feront des trucs qui peuvent faire monter lotus en gamme de façon credible, ca me parait tout a fait plausible.
c est déjà plus sympa de parler d une hyperbare électrique que d n SUV:)



de pistonheads:
"We're not big fans of so-called teaser images, the ones that drop veiled hints about future models and which are intended to drum up interest. Images like the one you see here, in fact, an abstract image of something low and sleek which marks the total imagery Lotus has released about the electric hypercar it has just told the Shanghai motor show that it is building, and which is currently known as the Type 130.

The other issue with such teasing comes when - as here - we actually know a fair bit about the car and the picture isn't going to do much of the telling. So this is going to be a bit word heavy.

PH has already seen a nearly finished model of the 130 in the design studio at Hethel and can confirm that it is reason for genuine excitement. It's a proper hypercar: low, muscular and with some of the most spectacular aerodynamics ever fitted to a road-legal car, none of which you can see here. It is also going to be the most expensive Lotus road car of all time, with what we're told to expect will be a seven-figure price tag and - almost certainly - the quickest as well.

Let's start all Donald Rumsfeld with the known unknowns. Or, at least, the ones that Lotus is keeping most closely guarded at this point. We know the Type 130 will be pure electric with a battery pack mounted behind its two-seat passenger compartment. We also know that it will be all-wheel drive and that the powertrain is being jointly developed with Williams Advanced Engineering, two of the most famous names in Grand Prix racing collaborating. But beyond that, and Lotus boss Phil Popham's promise that it will offer an "entirely appropriate" level of performance for its market segment, all is speculation. Based on the car's price and positioning we'd be surprised if the system's total horsepower tally didn't run into four figures, and if range wasn't at least 250 miles. But we have to wait and see on that front.

The styling, though, is jaw-dropping. Created by a small team led by Lotus's long-serving design boss, Russell Carr, work began on the 130 pretty much as soon as the ink was dry on the contract for Geely's acquisition of a majority stake in the company. Length is similar to the Evora but it is lower and the width is pushing two metres. The core structure will be carbon fibre, and the body will be tightly proportioned to better allow airflow to pass around it.

The best feature is one that isn't even hinted at in the official rendering, two huge air channels that effectively tunnel beneath the rear bodywork and which will have the elements of the tail lamps built around them. It's a detail that Carr says has been inspired by the venturi gaps of LMP race cars. For anyone standing behind the Type 130, or trying to keep up with one, the most striking thing about it will be what isn't there rather than what is. Given Lotus's minimalist ethos, that seems fitting, doesn't it?

These tunnels will incorporate lighting element to better show them off in the dark, and there will also be a transparent cover which will show off the top of the battery pack and also the pushrod cranks for the rear suspension. Carr says the 130 will also have a sizeable underfloor diffuser to generate significant downforce, with other active aero features including DRS flaps. Like the Pininfarina Battista, this is an EV that has definitely been designed for high-speed work.

The cabin will feature a predictable quantity of carbon fibre and a minimal digital instrument pack, but the plan is to have a centre console with switches rather than just a touchscreen. "You want to be able to find functions without taking your eyes off the road in a car like this," Carr says. Passenger space will be more generous than in a Ford GT or an Aston Martin Valkyrie, with enough shoulder space to stop occupants from having to get intimate with each other and sliding seats instead of a moveable pedal box. "We're trying to get the balance between prestige and luxury right," Carr says, "but also to make clear that this is a very high performance car. We don't want people to think it's a stripped-out track day monster, it will be much more practical than that. But equally we don't want to make a Bugatti either, it has to be a Lotus."

There are some other special details as well, including a camera-based rear view system which uses pods that motor out of the doors rather than conventional mirrors, these relaying images to a pair of screens in the cockpit. It's a very similar idea to the one that McLaren recently showed as featuring on the forthcoming Speedtail. "We were frustrated when we saw those," Carr admits, "we'd been working on the same idea for some time." Great minds clearly think alike.

The good news is that we won't have to wait very long to see more detailed images of the car, with the 130 set to be formerly unveiled at an event in London this summer when it will also gain a more Lotus-appropriate name - suggestions in the comments, please. It will be available to order later this year and the small group of buyers will be taking delivery of their cars as soon as 2020. It's definitely a halo model rather than the future of the brand - we will have to wait a bit longer for Lotus's more accessible next-generation sportscars - but isn't it nice to have some good news from Hethel again?"


Mar Avr 16, 2019 10:51 am
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
vu l accord avec Williams il y de grande chance que les dessous de la 130 soit ceci:

https://www.williamsf1.com/advanced-eng ... v-platform


Jeu Avr 18, 2019 6:27 pm
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
dmax a écrit:
vu l accord avec Williams il y de grande chance que les dessous de la 130 soit ceci:

https://www.williamsf1.com/advanced-eng ... v-platform

De l'article Pistonheads ils annoncent une présentation "en vrai" cet été a Londres, donc on verra.


Ven Avr 19, 2019 12:50 pm
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
montage en cours pour le festival of speed ou ils exposent maintenant depuis quelques editions.
il faut dire qu en dehors du spectacle en piste, le FOS est aussi devenu un vrai salon de l auto avec des stands constructeurs impressionnants:)


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Mar Juin 25, 2019 8:35 am
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
Pas que de l électrique au programme...heureusement :)

https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/phil ... s-2855744/


Dim Juin 30, 2019 12:40 pm
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Message Re: Actualité Lotus
Est ce qu il y a un streaming demain prévu pour la présentation de la 130?


Lun Juil 15, 2019 10:43 pm
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