Lotus is “studying” plans to open a US factory as the Chinese-backed carmaker is seeking to ramp up production beyond its UK homebase.The plant would be the third for the Norfolk-based sports car brand, after its owner Geely funded a factory in the Chinese town of Wuhan to produce Lotus’s first core electric model, the Eletre. The Wuhan plant, which was opened this year, has a capacity of 150,000 cars a year.
“We want to expand our capacity somewhere else,” Lotus Group CEO Qingfeng Feng said on the sidelines of the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Thursday. The company was “studying” US options along with other potential countries, he added. A decision is likely before the end of the year.
A US site would mark the scale of the transformation of the brand, which for decades only made hand-built sports cars in the East Anglian city of Norwich, 160km north-east of London. Geely, which acquired a 51 per cent stake in the company in 2017, has invested more than ￡3bn in the British carmaker.