“With Lotus being a smaller company, and with us growing up, it makes sense to take technologies from our sister companies.
“If you go to an OEM for their parts, you have to pay for the privilege of going in the shop to see if you want the parts. With Geely and our sister companies, we can go and see if we want the parts, and if we do we then pay for them.
“For a small company, that really helps. But it works the opposite way as well: our sister companies and Geely come to Lotus for powertrain development, EDU development, ride and handling development – it’s a really flexible, organic organisation.
“We’re stronger as a group, but we’re individual enough in that group that you don’t all become morphed together. It’s a fine balancing act and I think they do it very well.”
The Type 133, which will follow Lotus convention in getting a name beginning with ‘E’ in production guise, will provide the brand with a more direct rival to the hugely popular Porsche Taycan, which company bosses confirmed as one of the main benchmarking influences while developing the Eletre SUV, despite the two cars’ different positionings.
Gavan Kershaw, Lotus’s director of attributes and product integrity, said dynamic development of the Eletre was “really, benchmarking the platform”, rather than the car itself, with a view to then rolling it out to the Type 133 and a future Type 134 crossover.
Kershaw referenced the suspension technologies – “active roll control, CDC [continuous damping control], air-sprung independent active rear steer and active aero” – as features that most obviously mark the aluminium Electric Premium Architecture out as the more dynamically oriented platform in the Geely Group stable. He also said they have been ‘package-protected’ for “everything we want to do” with future electric cars, suggesting the Type 133 will follow suit with a similar set-up.
“Our type of car – that we want to drive as well as it looks – requires all that technology,” he said, hinting that the ‘lifestyle’ positioning of EVs built by Lotus Technology in Wuhan, China, will not come at the expense of driver engagement.