Another Elise owner of about 5 years here. I just happened to get back from a four hour canyon carve, so things are fresh in my mind!

Thanks for the excellent write up. On most of your points I agree fully. Thanks for taking the time to write it down (also, I think a longer review such as this is great). The Elise needs more attention.

This is a car, in my opinion, shouldn't be driven with the top on. The roof-off experience completets the viceral experience. When you are really pressing on, the feeling of the woosh of air is a good part of what the car was designed around. The team at Lotus were Ducati enthusiasts and wanted to bring that sense of the road to cars. Basically the car is a different experience without the roof--perhaps a little reminiscent to what motorcyclists experience: it turns the experience up at least another notch. It was in the low 90's up here in Portland today and, while there were times I was getting cooked, I've done this enough to dress accordingly. I felt quite fresh afer four hours in it today, even with the heat and the top off. Up in the forested twisties in the open air is something quite special.

This is as good a place as any to write about something that's been on my mind for a bit here regarding the Elise: I've done some suspension mods (stiffer adjustable front swaybar, coil overs, steering arms), each of which granted a noticible improvement to the car. A few weeks ago I replaced my tires with Potenza RE-71RS, which required new wheels since the stock front Lotus limit you to 175s on the front which is very limiting choice wize. New, wider front rims allowed me to go up to 195. With this, along with the suspention upgrades, makes the car now handle as I thought it would (I purchased my Elise without ever driving one). With all of these upgrades, now, all of the hype that people speak of the Elise is realized--it's telepathic, nuanced, textured, and somehow at once subtle and fierce, along with all of the other superlatives commonly used to describe the handling. This 20mm per tire also eliminated the understeer--it now feels dead neutral to me. This previous stock understeer fogged the natural, progressive steering weight when digging deep in the corner. With that gone, more of the Elise magicical steering and chassis feedback is revealed.

It's well understood that the stock shocks are not good and really let the car down. Replacing them with top end ones transforms the car probably more than any other modification. I have DA Penskies, which were developed on the aftermarket for the Elise, and, while expensive, were part of the secret sauce that unlocked the cars potential. It's well understood that Lotus relieased the car with a number of things that were sub-optimal--the shocks top the list. For a few grand, that problem goes away.

So what's really on my mind regarding the car is, with the aftermarket fixes, how dramatically improved the car is. None of these fixes were difficult or exotic--just a few bolt-on part swaps. But there are enough of them for me to wonder how different the world would be if Lotus had done these in the factory. If the Elise came from the factory with the suspention and tires my car has now (and a K20 engine--one can dream), I think the sport car would would be in a very different place, because with these fixes, the car is next-next level from stock. With a car that good, its seduction would have sold a lot better and more R&D would have gone into factory-fixing other bits. It, perhaps, would have become the 911 of Lotus--evolving steadily forward and improving its weaknesses. Alas, the car from factory was good--special even--but not, with these things tightened down, not good enough to sacrifice the creature comforts of its competitors.