Bahar formed his team whom he believed will propel the group forward which includes Donato Coco who was also from Ferrari, Andreas Schlegel who was involved in market and network development at Aston Martin, former Sales and Business Development director of Ferrari, Andreask Prillmann, EDAG USA’s Robert Hentshcel and Frank Tuch who was previously engaged with Porsche.
Bahar is confident that his team of personnel will push Lotus ahead where they intend to diversify from their current niche market product lines into the premium supercar segment which is established by the Ferraris and Porsches. Using the Real Madrid Football Team as the analogy, Bahar said that they intend to position the pricing of their cars to €100,000 to €130,000 by 2015. They are currently rolling out some 2,000 to 2,500 units annually and with the new direction, they want to move that figure up to 6,000 to 8,000 every year.
Adopting the “Tomorrow’s luxury sports car, today” motto, the company is planning to expand its market to 25 new markets to add to its current 30 markets around the world. One thing you can surely expect from Lotus is that they will be moving towards a more upmarket segment and their manual transmission gearbox only configurations and will come with the 7 speed twin clutch transmission configurations.
One thing for sure, the move towards this direction would be quite risky as they are up against some very stiff competition, especially when you are talking about the Ferraris and Porsches who have long established their brands worldwide while Lotus (even if they have not been that profitable) had always been controlling that niche market. You can surely expect that the current models like the Elise or the Evora would be retained with enhancements coming up, but you can expect some new bigger additions as well.
