Geely plans to return Lotus to the position of the first-line sports car brand. Recently, 55-year-old CEO Jean-Marc Gales of Lotus was interviewed by foreign media, and he revealed Li Shufu's specific plan to save Lotus for the first time.
Lotus who wants to make a splash.
Lotus Group, which has been in the mode of "small workshop operation" for a long time, is now divided into Lotus cars that produce sports cars and Lotus projects that provide consulting services to other manufacturers, with 850 employees worldwide. As the saying goes, it is easy to do things with confidence. Li Shufu's merger and acquisition has given this British company "short of money and resources" stable financial and business support and greatly expanded its workforce. Lotus itself no longer has to worry about food and clothing, and can display its fists and feet.
Lotus is a small sports car brand in Britain.
After Geely acquired Lotus, Mr. An Conghui, President and CEO of Zhejiang Geely Automobile Group, once said, "Lotus was once as famous as Ferrari and Porsche, and we need to let Lotus return to this level." Porsche once relied on the Cayenne SUV to come back to life, and Ferrari is about to launch its own SUV model. Since everyone has achieved quite good sales performance by SUV, will Lotus also go to this market to share a piece of the action? The answer is undoubtedly yes.
For the future product planning, Mark Geller, CEO of Lotus, said: "Lotus's first SUV model will come out around 2022." This SUV is regarded as the key to the revival of Lotus. He also revealed more information: the new SUV will adopt a new design language, but will still maintain the design DNA of Lotus. The new SUV will focus on the medium and large SUV market, with competing products including Porsche Macan and higher-level Cayenne.
SUV is the lifeline of sports car brands?
Traditional car sports cars and even coupes have little room for growth now, and sports car brands have turned their attention to SUV models without exception. Thanks to the increasingly strong road driving ability of SUV models, people with their own car audiences have also turned to the more practical SUV camp, which is the main reason for the hot SUV.
(The safety performance of SUV has inherent advantages)
Another reason that can't be ignored is safety, because the height of general SUVs is higher than that of cars, so it must be SUV models that simply let SUVs collide with cars. According to the mortality report issued by IIHS 20 17, the overall mortality rate of SUV models is 21110,000, while the overall mortality rate of cars is 39/ 1 10,000. Among them, in bicycle accidents, the death rate of SUV is 8/ 1 10,000, while the death rate of car is 15/ 1 10,000; In multi-vehicle accidents, the death rate of SUV is 12/ 1 10,000, and that of car is 24/ 1 10,000. From the data point of view, SUVs are indeed safer than cars.
(More and more sports car brands are entering the SUV market)
For these reasons, it is a reasonable choice for consumers to buy SUVs. We take luxury sports car brands such as Lotus as examples, such as Porsche Cayenne and Maserati Lavnte, to get their brands out of the downturn; Like Bentley Tim Yue and Jaguar F-PACE have become the backbone of their respective brands; Even Ferrari and Lamborghini have to launch SUVs to attract more rich people.
Top works in CMA modular platform
What does Lotus's SUV look like? As early as last year 10, the suspected patent map broke out. From the picture, the overall shape of Lotus SUV is very sporty. The front face is shaped with a large mouth grille, the front enclosing line is very sharp, and there are two air inlets on the left and right sides, so you can see the shadows of many lotus family designs.
(Suspected Lotus SUV patent map)
From the side, the new car adopts the popular slip-back design, and the overall lines are very smooth, which is in line with the rise.
The waistline design further highlights the sporty color. In terms of the tail, the new car shows the tail shape very full through the outline of many lines, and the round taillights full of lotus family style are preserved in this new car. In addition, the new car adopts bilateral exhaust layout and is designed with a rear diffuser, which is also in line with its brand positioning.
(Suspected Lotus SUV patent map)
As for the technical resources of this SUV, there is no doubt that with the scale of Lotus, Geely will definitely not let Lotus develop an SUV platform alone, which is a bit too wasteful for the whole group, whether it is manpower, material resources or financial resources. At first, it was expected that the Lotus SUV would be built on the CMA modular platform, because the high flexibility of the platform enabled it to meet the demand of high performance, and also provided a four-wheel drive option.
When asked by reporters whether the new car will adopt CMA modular platform, Mark Geller gave the default. He did not directly admit that he would use "platform or architecture", but expressed or adopted the same "part". For example, Lexus 0 1 and Lotus SUV under the CMA platform of Geely Group are similar to the relationship between Volkswagen Touareg and Lamborghini Urus under the MLB EVO platform of Volkswagen Group.
Bianxiao language
For Lotus, a sports car brand in urgent need of transformation, it is definitely the right choice to launch SUV models, because the strong purchasing power of the SUV market is enough to rejuvenate a brand in a trough, which is Lotus' goal.
What makes us look forward to is that if Lotus's SUV is successful, Lotus will definitely redevelop a brand-new sports car model with sufficient funds. By then, benchmarking Porsche and Ferrari will no longer be a simple slogan.