Can Lotus thrive away from its Norfolk home?

Trips to visit Lotus in Hethel, Norfolk for much of the 2010s followed a very similar format.

There’d be a chance to drive the latest variant of the Elise or Exige with a few extra kilograms taken out of them, followed by a chat with the management of how better times were ahead.

It was admirable the company kept going for so long in that period after the chaos left behind by Dany Bahar who, whatever you think of his plans to grow the brand and launch new model lines, made the crucial mistake of trashing the cars that needed to be sold in the meantime. 

History will be kinder to Jean-Marc Gales, the man who picked up the pieces after Bahar and steered Lotus through some of its darkest days when the company had a real hand-to-mouth feel to it. His ‘animated’ style was not universally popular, it’s fair to say, yet he ran the business diligently and kept the lights on.

Well, the lights were kept on metaphorically at least, for Hethel always felt deserted in the mid-2010s, a tone set when you drove into the site and were met with the ‘skeleton building’ of a steel frame from Bahar’s attempts to grow Lotus’s production capacity.

Whole floors of desks were unused in the main headquarters, and you’d question whether Gales was actually the only executive at the place for the ghostly feel on his office’s floor.

It’s in this office that the better days were always promised, and they finally started to arrive when Geely took a 51% stake in Lotus Cars in 2017. Geely’s presence at Hethel built up gradually, the staff-pleasing early signs including resurfacing the car park, making the coffee machine free, and then redoing the canteen. 

Car wise, things changed more slowly: it took four years for the Evora to become the Emira (via the reveal of the limited-run Evija hypercar, which is understood to have been created under Gales but not revealed until after his departure) and the production facilities were upgraded accordingly in Hethel. On my last visit there in summer 2021 there was a real freshness and vibrancy to the place for the first time in recent memory, now under the leadership of Matt Windle.

To return to Hethel now and you’d likely think not much else has changed, but in fact there’s been more change at Lotus in the past two years than in perhaps the rest of its history combined. Having been stagnant for so long, the company’s rapid pace of back-office growth and implementation of a new structure since then takes some getting your head around.