LDV, the defunct British van maker, sold to SAIC, is making a comeback, with UK sales restarting.

SAIC Motor Corp. has started shipping Chinese-built LDV brand vans to the United Kingdom seven years after it acquired LDV Group, a bankrupt U.K. commercial vehicle maker.

On Dec. 29, SAIC Commercial Vehicle Co., a subsidiary of SAIC Motor Corp., initiated the shipment of 3,000 LDV V80 vans to the United Kingdom.

The vehicles will arrive in Birmingham. SAIC Commercial Vehicle says it plans to open as many as 10 dealerships in the United Kingdom to market and sell the vehicles.

The van is built on a platform that SAIC bought in 2009 from LDV Group. The vehicles are produced in Wuxi, a city 140 kilometers west of Shanghai. They are fitted with a 2.5-liter turbocharged gasoline engine and a six-speed manual transmission.

SAIC Commercial Vehicle has yet to disclose prices for the LDV V80 to be sold in the United Kingdom. In China, the van has a starting price of 124,800 yuan ($19,200).

The company also has developed a multipurpose vehicle dubbed G10 on the same platform purchased from LDV Group.

In China, the V80 van and G10 MPV are marketed under the Maxus brand. Outside China, they are distributed under the LDV brand.

In 2015, SAIC sold roughly 35,000 V80s and G10s globally. Exports of the two models were estimated at 4,900 vehicles. Australia is the largest overseas market for the two models.

SAIC also sells passenger vehicles under the Roewe and MG brands. The vehicles are developed mainly with technologies that the state-owned Chinese automaker bought in 2005 from bankrupt U.K. carmaker MG Rover.

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Lotus Cars aims for new SUV to be launched in 2018, along with profits and US re-entry.

British sports car maker Lotus Cars will be profitable again by 2017 after years of losing money, CEO Jean-Marc Gales said. The former PSA/Peugeot-Citroen and Daimler executive has implemented measures to cut costs while improving the automaker’s product lineup since he took over Lotus in May 2014. 

But Gales said the company will not launch all-new cars until its new China-built SUV debuts in 2018/19 as he focuses on boosting sales and cashflow.

Lotus will increase sales in the short term by making changes to the current three-car line-up, Gales said. The company has added an automatic transmission to its track-focused Exige two-seater, which is close to passing the entry-level Elise as the company’s top-seller. 

Gales expects 40 percent of Exige sales to be models with the automatic transmission.

The company also unveiled a facelifted version of the flagship Evora coupe at the Geneva auto show in March that will spearhead the brand’s return to the U.S. market.  The Evora was the only Lotus model sold in the U.S. but was dropped for the 2015 model year because it no longer met federal crash standards.

Lotus has redesigned the Evora to meet U.S. standards and moved the mid-engine coupe further upmarket to better compete with the likes of the Porsche 911 and Audi R8. A convertible version is due next year. Gales expects the U.S. to be the Evora's biggest market.

Supplier squeeze

Gales said Lotus has stripped 10 percent from the costs out of producing cars and he plans further cut costs by switching suppliers. “We are going through our whole supply chain, gradually replacing smaller suppliers with larger ones, reducing costs and improving quality,” he said.

Last September Lotus said it was cutting 225 jobs from the 1,250 workforce at its headquarters here. The final figure was 260, Gales said.

Gales has also scaled back the work of the company’s consultancy, Lotus Engineering, a separate arm of Group Lotus that contracts engineering services to automakers and suppliers. “It used to account for half of Lotus revenue 10-15 years ago. Now it’s 10 percent,” he said. “It was a conscious decision to focus the engineers flat out on the development of our road cars.”

Gales said he does not expect the engineering side of the business to grow again until after three to four years.

Lotus said that its wholesale vehicle sales were up 55 percent to 2,015 in the financial year to the end of March 2015, from 1,403 the year before. Gales said he is targeting annual sales of 3,500 by 2016.

Lotus’s sales growth has been boosted by an expansion of dealerships. Gales aims to increase Lotus dealerships to 200 by the end of this year from 174 by the end of March.

He said that losses have been “massively reduced” in the year to the end of March compared to a loss of 65.6 million pounds ($100 million) for the year ending March 31, 2014. The year before Lotus lost 159.4 million pounds, according to figures released by the company.

Gales says that the company will show a profit in the financial year ending March 2017. “It’s something we haven’t done consistently from the car side in over 20 years,” he said.

Gales’s ambitions for Lotus are more modest than those of his predecessor, former Ferrari executive Dany Bahar, who had planned to boost Lotus's annual vehicle sales to 10,000, a similar volume to Ferrari. Bahar was fired in 2012.

Nick Gibbs

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Volvo continue to grow at a huge rate in China.

Volvo Car Corp.'s sales in China rose 43 percent year on year in August to 6,154 vehicles due to strong demand for the XC60 SUV and the stretched S60 compact sedan.

Last month, Volvo sold 2,449 XC60s and more than 2,000 S60Ls in China.

Volvo also sold nearly 500 Volvo V60 compact cars in China in August. The company did not disclose sales of the other models in the country last month.

For the first eight months, the Swedish automaker's deliveries rose 37 percent in China to 51,568 vehicles.

China is the largest global market for Volvo, which is owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. To boost sales in China, Volvo began producing the S60L at its new plant in Chengdu last year and is ramping up to full capacity of 120,000 vehicles annually.

The S60L, built only in China, has a wheelbase extended by 81 millimeters (3.2 inches) to 2,857 millimeters (112.5 inches).

Last month, Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson told Automotive News that Volvo would export Chinese-built S60L sedans to the United States sometime next year.

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CHINA - Infiniti stretches Q50 for local sales, and calls it the Q50L

• Extended wheelbase for greater passenger comfort
• Portfolio expansion delivers against Infiniti’s global growth plan
• First Infiniti model to be produced locally in China

Infiniti today announces the world premiere of the Q50L, the new long-wheelbase variant of its Q50 sports saloon. With a 48mm/1.9in longer wheelbase than the standard Q50, the Q50L provides more room and comfort for rear passengers.

With this introduction, Infiniti is delivering on its strategy to accommodate the sophisticated Chinese market, listening closely to customers’ needs. Of further note, the Q50L is in keeping with the soon-to-launch (in the U.S. and Canada) updated Q70L long wheel base saloon, a model which originated in the Chinese market in 2012. The Q50L is dedicated to the mainland Chinese market and will be offered exclusively there.

The stylish and tech-savvy Q50L premium sports saloon debuts at the end of August for the public and press at the Chengdu Motor Show (Sichuan province) in Comfort, Elegant, Sports, Luxury and Luxury Sports trims, providing a wide range of personalised choices for aspiring premium customers. Deliveries start in the beginning of November.

Of equal significance, Q50L is the first domestically produced Infiniti model for the important Chinese market. Production will take place at the Xiangyang factory in Hubei province, which becomes the fourth assembly plant for Infiniti vehicles globally. China is a rapidly growing market which is now considered a major hub of reference for the Infiniti brand worldwide. Sales growth year-on-year for the first six months of 2014 reached 130%, or total deliveries of just over 14,000 vehicles.

The launch of the Infiniti Q50L marks the next step in the company’s global growth plan underlining its determination to turn China into Infiniti’s second volume hub globally. At the core of the plan is a mix of global as well as dedicated regional models that expand the company’s portfolio while establishing a broader global manufacturing footprint.

The Infiniti Q50L has an overall length of 4852mm/191.0in and wheelbase stretched to 2898mm/114.1in adding nicely to the rear passengers’ sense of premium comfort with the most legroom in this special segment. The Q50L is powered by Infiniti’s first 2.0-litre in-line four-cylinder gas engine that is turbocharged to 211hp and 350Nm of torque. Together with its 7-speed automatic transmission with manual shift mode, this power train perfectly combines performance and fuel efficiency.

Representative of Infiniti’s high-tech priorities with the Q50L, the world’s first steer-by-wire system – Direct Adaptive Steering (DAS) – is also included, allowing unprecedented driving comfort, safety, and low-effort steering precision. The intuitive double touch-screen  Infiniti InTouch HCI system, Active Lane Control (ALC), new Bose^® 14-speaker Studio on Wheels^®  audio system, plus other on board extras like the in-car mood light system, rear window sunshade, electronic anti-glare side mirrors, all ensure the Infiniti Q50L can meet or exceed the needs of discerning Chinese customers.

While the globally successful standard-wheelbase Q50 will continue being imported to the Chinese mainland market from the Tochigi factory in Japan, the fully Chinese-assembled Q50L is a direct answer to growing demand for Infiniti products in the region.