Matt Windle interview with Car and Driver

Not a review - but very good read.

Matt Windle Is Bullish about Lotus's Future Prospects

The specialty carmaker has a new lease on life, and its managing director goes into detail with us about the present and near future.

www.caranddriver.com

 

[Nova]

The chassis bottleneck isn’t affecting current production. It’s one of the key limiting factors in scaling up production from one shift to two.

In theory one shift can produce 5,000 cars per year and hence two shifts should be 10,000. But it’ll only be 7,000 until they have addressed the chassis production bottleneck.

That bottleneck has been well known and talked about externally since at least mid 2022.

I was not aware of this limitation. Is it that wondrous machine that does the bonding? Do they need a couple more?

 

[simonb]

The chassis bottleneck isn’t affecting current production. It’s one of the key limiting factors in scaling up production from one shift to two.

In theory one shift can produce 5,000 cars per year and hence two shifts should be 10,000. But it’ll only be 7,000 until they have addressed the chassis production bottleneck.

That bottleneck has been well known and talked about externally since at least mid 2022.

Have Lotus ever exceeded 7000 cars a year, and are they likely to (excluding the Wuhan output which should dwarf that number)
I suspect the SMT at Hethel would sleep a lot easier if they were comfortably achieving 100 cars a week output

 

[TomE]

I was not aware of this limitation. Is it that wondrous machine that does the bonding? Do they need a couple more?

The bonding machine is in the main production facility at Hethel and glues the panels to the chassis. The chassis and sub-frames are built at a different facility nearby in Norwich. I don't think that's been shown on any of the YouTuber videos but I think was in the "Lotus: New Dawn" TV programme. I believe the constraint there is the physical size and layout of the facility versus being able to increase the throughput.

Have Lotus ever exceeded 7000 cars a year, and are they likely to (excluding the Wuhan output which should dwarf that number)
I suspect the SMT at Hethel would sleep a lot easier if they were comfortably achieving 100 cars a week output

Emira is a massive step change for Lotus, even going to 5,000 cars a year. I think their previous peak was 2,500-3,000. They've certainly sized the Hethel factory to cater for 5/10/15k cars per year, with growth needing more hires and some extra facilities investment. They originally planned a gradual ramp up in production volumes over 3-4 months and the second shift was viewed as a contingency plan to kick in maybe 6-12 months after first deliveries started. Then they launched the car and were surprised by the much higher volume of interest - 5 or 10 times the expected number of deposits in the first 4 weeks after launch.

The production engineers have shown it's feasible to build the cars in the target times. They just need a reliable supply of parts and getting the workforce and processes bedded in. Then 100/week should be achievable.

 

[Porter]

The bonding machine is in the main production facility at Hethel and glues the panels to the chassis. The chassis and sub-frames are built at a different facility nearby in Norwich. I don't think that's been shown on any of the YouTuber videos but I think was in the "Lotus: New Dawn" TV programme. I believe the constraint there is the physical size and layout of the facility versus being able to increase the throughput.

There are several different bonding robots. Here are three that were shown in the New Dawn documentary...

 

[TomE]

Thanks. I believe the second two pictures are of the same large robot, which has multiple arms and is used to apply the adhesive and fit the panels? The roof is the same in both and is at Hethel. The first one looks like chassis and has different safety screens, so could be Norwich.

 

[Concept24]

With Geely, quality is the one thing they talk to me about all the time. It's our first KPI [key performance indicator] we measure. We don't measure output, we don't measure cost, we measure quality first. And again, I'll show you when we walk through the factory, you'll see where we're trying to get to is a no-fault forward. Historically here you'd kind of get a car at the end of the line and it'd be like, “Right, it's got a few problems with it, you've got to work it out.” Now the mentality is it does not come out your station unless you've got that quality, and you are responsible for that.

Now THIS is great news. This appears to be much closer to Japanese thinking.