Lotus are selling the Evora platform to niche car makers.
Lotus are offering their Evora platform to car makers looking to produce niche cars.
Lotus is a small, profitable and innovative company working miles away from any tech valleys or high profile sites, buried away in rural Norfolk. But with the car world losing shed loads of cash on a daily basis Lotus has remained profitable. How?
Apart from the appeal of their car products (until recently that would read ‘product’) they are very good at taking on development work for other car makers and marketing their own technology. They are involved in projects like the XJ Limo Green, which uses the Lotus Range Extender engine. They have a big reputation for suspension design and have managed to not only make the Elise a success for more than a decade but allow Tesla to make it the basis of the Tesla Roadster.
And now it appears they plan the same with the Evora platform. The Evora’s platform – which offers Versatile Vehicle Architecture (VVA) – is flexible enough to accommodate anything from a sports car to an SUV with any sort of powertrain from electric, through hybrid to conventional petrol.
Lotus are aiming to punt out the Lotus Evora platform to niche makers for bespoke and small-volume production or even to build them a bespoke platform based on the Evora. As the man from Lotus said: “If manufacturers want to do niche vehicles easily and effectively this is the way to do it”.
So, where’s my garden shed and the piggy bank?
