We always had a niggling suspicion that there wasn’t as much substance as style to the new Lotus company and brand launch plan being pursued by CEO Dany Bahar. And reports from Autocar confirm as much, an in interview with new advisory board member Bob Lutz. The former General Motors head and long-standing figure in the automotive industry now sits on Lotus’ new board of what it describes as “industry experts” - there to advise on how best to run the company.

Lutz gives Lotus at least a 60 percent chance of being successful in achieving its plans to launch five new models, gear prices towards the 100,000 pounds figure and sell six to seven thousand models a year. Not being “industry experts” as such ourselves (at least not at this level), the figure initially sounds low in percentage terms - about what you would need to pass a school exam. But it’s probably conservatively optimistic and highly realistic in real business terms.

Lutz says: “People keep asking me if I’m sure the new plan will work, and of course I can’t guarantee that. It’s a risk. But I’m quite certain it stands a better chance than the Lotus status quo, which for sure would eventually lead this great brand into terminal decline.”

While a lot of the shimmer around the five models revealed at Paris and some of the first marketing steps taken so far are what Lutz describes as “a fair bit of showbiz”, it seems that it might be exactly what’s needed to boost initial desire for Lotus models. Definitely all that glitters is not gold, but Lotus itself is aware of this and the five models we saw could be considered prototype models in that plenty of change is likely to happen before any of them hit the market.

Given the recent history over at General Motors, Bob Lutz might not necessarily be considered the best person to be advising but it seems he has a few key observations to make. He’s far from waxing lyrical over the new efforts, saying that backers of the new Lotus plan are taking “a pretty big gamble”, but he does say that the engineering work is very good and is being carried out at “a fraction of what we’d have spent at GM on similar projects”. Here’s hoping that Bahar takes some steady advice and doesn’t gamble too much on image and not enough on what lies behind it.

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