Lotus Emira V8 in Testing & Other News

Okay so today's Lotus Technology group investor call happened this morning.

Here are some updates:

- Hybrid Plugin Macan Competitor 2026Q1 China, Q3 ROW
- Facelift 2027 Lotus Emira I4 with power increase
- Lotus Emira V6 Discontinued
- Lotus Emira V8 Euro 7 Compliant powertrain in investigation/testing/development.

Thanks @Lotustoronto for being our live discord blogger


Disclaimer: I'm basing this off recollections from someone else from the call, I haven't had time to listen to the full call myself, but some things may be inaccurate, and a lot of info has been missed too, I recommend you listen to the call yourself, the QA starts at 21 minutes in.

 

[OppositeLock]

Sorry, but that is crazy talk.

What's crazy about it? I was oversimplifying, but when warm, and with a good condition catalyst, it will be very clean _most_ of the time. Where I live in CA, in a valley surrounded by mountains, we are very susceptible to smog, so I'm interested in clean cars. Most of this smog comes from old cars, furnaces, big diesel engines, things which emit unprocessed combustion products into the air. The shift to OBD-II came with a set of emissions requirements which were pretty tight, so OBD-II cars emit most of their pollution when the catalyst is warming up or when they're going open-loop since the ECU can't run in closed loop mode in some situation.

Years ago, I did some research into car emissions in CA, and came to the conclusion that 1 old classic car without emissions controls pollutes about as much as about as much as about 2,000 OBD-I cars, and about as much as 30,000 OBD-II post-2004 cars, and by pollution, I mean unburned hydrocarbons, NOx, oxygen allotropes and CO, I wasn't counting evaporative emissions and didn't factor CO2 at all.

Going off on a tangent here, but the biggest win for cleaning up our air is to clean up the oldest engines, in cars, ships, generators, heavy trucks.