Surely by now everyone that has one braincell and another to rub it against clenches when a company they like is going to go public. It’s bad on companies that you have seen grow and think would really do well if more protected from the needs of faceless greedy investors.
It’s worse when the brand is storied.
Now, I’m not completely daft. I know that the current Lotus has about as much to do with the company that invented the Lotus 7 as the QE2 has with a Kayak. The Geely-Owned Lotus is in the middle of a revolution. One which seems to have as its sole goal to etch the Brand into the collective consciousness instead of being ignored by everyone except hardcore car enthusiasts who will buy an exige…as long as it’s used.
To that end, the idea is to ramp production to where Lotus can make “Tens of thousands” of vehicles. And what are these going to be? We’re still not entirely sure Apart from the Eletre electric crossover and the 130-odd Evijas that the company will make. The Emira is also there I guess, ready to close the ICE chapter for the brand. From there, it’s scrambling to make some new sports cars that are competitive and somehow true to the brand’s core values while creating some entirely new core values at the same time.
It’s a tall order, and one which I don’t think will be especially helped by the incursion of the aforementioned faceless greedy investors. Under the Geely fold (GELYF), any investment that they or other parent company Etika Automotive do is buried in the quarterly report, by letting it lose on NASDAQ suddenly every decision regarding automotive development and a quick turnaround to profitability gets considerably more scrutinized.
All of that putting pressure on a company that started with an hotelier’s son and his friend building a racing car. A company whose more stable source of income is as consultants for other manufacturers. The one that never really committed to make vehicles for the mainstream. That last one is plain to see when you remember that their idea of a more mainstream car was the Excel.
Well, that and that one time that they took an Opel Omega and turned it into one of the finest sports sedans the world has ever seen.
Going public is unlikely to produce another Lotus Carlton. But what it could do is provide the R&D team with some additional breathing room to make something that will cause people to go “Yes, but what about the Lotus?” And if the team gets that breathing room, they better make the best of it, because the investors will come back in a couple of months asking for a return on that investment; and they’re not going to be particularly picky about the company being alive after they’re done collecting.
As you can tell, I’m conflicted on this.
