Recent developments at Lotus Cars strongly suggest that the legendary British sports car company is setting up to
build cars for other automakers.
Lotus builds about 5,000 cars per year, with its new supercar due to be
added to the total soon. But Autocar reports that Lotus has the capacity to handle up to 8,000 cars a year.
Lotus says that it has two opportunities for contract manufacturing on the table at the moment, one of which
could be VW’s GX-3 trike, which debuted as a “we may build it if the market’s there” concept car at the L.A.
Auto Show in January. The GX-3 prototype was
recently seen testing at Lotus’ test track.
Lotus has been positioning itself as a potential contractor to
bigger car companies for some time, developing a contract engineering business, and more recently unveiling its APX
concept car to demonstrate its product development and manufacturing capabilities.