I somehow missed this news note Friday night because, well, it was dropped late on Friday night. Car And Driver is reporting that Lotus is pulling out of the Paris Motor Show in 2012. This is significant because the show is where Dany Bahar tried to kill the brand in 2010.
Upon seeing the new CEO's mess in Paris we predicted failure.
Thankfully, the failure took down Bahar and his band of mostly B-list celebrities but the company appears spared and will, we hope, skip Paris to continue to regroup and focus on a brighter, lighter future.
It's odd timing for this story to leak. Fridays are called "take out the trash days" because smart press secretaries use them to bury bad news — the thinking being that less people are around to read the news on Saturday. The 24-hour news cycle disrupts this a bit, but a late Friday night is about the best place to place a negative news story.
Is Car And Driver helping out someone at Lotus by promising to hide the bad news late on a Friday night in exchange for future consideration? Did someone leak, or withhold information, in just the right way? Is it just a coincidence? I don't know, but I'm curious.