The heart-stop moment came on early Friday morning. A source with impeccable connections to Lotus UK told Autocar that the order had come from China to prepare its historic manufacturing facility in Hethel for closure.
A second source backed up that bombshell. Lotus was investigating moving sports car production to the US. Separately, the Financial Times discovered from a different source that Hethel was indeed on the chopping block, threatening 1300 jobs.
On Saturday, however, Lotus put out a statement that “there are no plans to close the factory”, pointing out that UK was “the heart of the Lotus brand”.
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