AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)03/22 Report--

After Geely took control of LOTUS, the established British sports car maker, it has been widely rumored that Lutes will be introduced into China. Now Geely has announced it, and this is the first time Geely has confirmed that Lutes is home-made. A few days ago, Geely Automobile Group CEO, President an Conghui said in an interview that Geely is going to start production of Lutes models at its Wuhan factory. An Conghui also revealed that after the acquisition of Lutes, Geely has a clear plan to revive Lutes to restore its due sales and influence.

Domestic "Lotus"

Historically, Lutes, Ferrari and Porsche are known as the world's three major sports car brands. After several changes of hands due to poor management, Geely Li Shufu finally bought it from Malaysia's Proton Motors and became the first sports car brand under Geely Holdings Group. The acquisition of Lutes not only further expanded Geely's overseas territory and business, but also realized Li Shufu's dream of building a sports car.

Li Shufu has said Geely wants to turn Lutes into a luxury brand that competes with Porsche and Ferrari. To this end, Geely has developed a plan to restore sales and influence to Fuxing Lutes. The plan includes building factories in China to increase sales and popularity, increasing investment to promote brand new sports cars, and so on.

Lutes domestic project has been confirmed to be settled in Wuhan earlier. An earlier statement on the website of Hubei Wuhan Development Zone revealed that Geely's new plant with an investment of 9 billion yuan includes a "production LOTUS project." In addition, Geely officially released recruitment information to introduce technical personnel to the Wuhan factory, including equipment and technical engineers, final assembly process engineers and process engineers of the Lutes project team.

With regard to the factory, the Hubei Development and Reform Commission announced that Zhejiang Geely Automobile Co., Ltd. built a project with an annual production capacity of 150000 passenger cars in Wuhan City. The project is located on Weihu Road, Shamao Street, Hannan District, Wuhan City. Geely holding Group contributed 2.031 billion yuan, accounting for 71.06%, and the legal representative is an Conghui.

Geely plans to invest a total of 9.044 billion yuan in the Wuhan factory, which will start construction at the beginning of 2019 and be completed by the end of 2021. After completion, it will form a multi-variety mixed-flow production capacity of 150000 passenger vehicles per year, including basic passenger vehicles (including traditional fuel vehicles and pure electric models, hybrid models) and other types of passenger vehicles.

Although it is not clear about Lutes' domestic model, it is certain that it is aimed at Porsche, and Lutes is likely to launch a luxury SUV and new energy car for the market.

Some people will be very confused about Lutes. Lutes is actually a well-known British old sports car brand-Lotus, but due to the problem of registering trademarks before other companies in China, LOTUS officials wanted to register the trademarks of "Lotus" and "LOTUS" was rejected by the Trademark Office, and finally chose the transliteration of LOTUS-Lutes, which is still in use today.

However, there is also a good news. After Geely decided to buy Lutes and introduce domestic products, Zhejiang Geely holding Group Co., Ltd. has submitted an application for trademark registration of "Lotus" and "LOTUS". In the future, the LOTUS brand is expected to correct its name and re-use the familiar "Lotus" car.

Revive "Lotus"

Feng Qingfeng, vice president of Geely Holdings and CEO of Lutes Motors, once said: "in the future, Lutes products will expand the product line of the entire brand on the basis of maintaining the original extreme sports characteristics, in order to meet the love of the original fans for Lutes, but also to meet the car needs of more ordinary consumers." It also revealed that in addition to retaining and continuing the most essential link of manual construction, it will also adjust the mode of production according to the actual situation and increase the proportion of automation.

Lutes confirmed that Lutes will launch a new sports car in 2020, which will inherit the family's excellent dynamic performance and lightweight car-building concept, while improving practicality, including convenience of getting on / off, ergonomics, infotainment system and so on.

The new sports car is part of Lutes' five-year development plan and will be based on a new platform that is "heavily upgraded" from the existing model platform. After the launch of this new sports car, a new generation of Elise, Exige and Evora will also be built on this platform within three or four years.

Lutes also said that in the future will continue to recruit more engineers to join Lutes, but also will use more resources from the parent company Geely.

Finally, the Chinese complex about Lotus. As a matter of fact, the Youth Lotus, which was once produced in China, has nothing to do with Lotus Motors. In fact, it is the product of cooperation between the Youth Group and Proton and the technical support provided by the Lotus Project. Lotus Engineering and Lotus Motor are different companies under the Lotus Group. Due to poor management, the Young Lotus has long been bankrupt and liquidated.

The introduction of Lutes by Geely is the beginning of the production of Lutes sports car brand in China.

Welcome to subscribe to the WeChat public account "Automotive Industry Focus" to get the first-hand insider information on the automotive industry and talk about things in the automotive circle. Welcome to break the news! WeChat ID autoWechat