Hethel is set to remain Lotus’s spiritual home and the place where its sports cars are designed and built. But the vast new Lotus plant in Wuhan seems set to become the brand’s powerhouse, definitely when it comes to sales volumes.
Lotus’s hefty prediction that it will be selling 150,000 of its ‘lifestyle EVs’ a year globally as soon as 2028 seems a whole lot more achievable after I took the chance to tour the spectacular new Chinese plant.
Factory manager Xi Tan is one of Geely’s most experienced, with a well-established track record for setting up new facilities. The dramatic expansion of the group’s activities has given him plenty of experience doing so over the years: Wuhan is the seventh factory of which he has led the establishment, although he admits that the first of those was actually a joint venture with Honda.
Work on what’s officially known as the Lotus Global EV Production Centre started in 2019, and it was formally opened in July last year.