Wrecked 2006 Lotus Exige with salvage title. The car is too far gone to bother trying to restore it back to being a perfect streetcar, but it’s not too far gone to become a highly modified, stripped down, fully caged, race car.
Let’s talk about the tub. That’s everyone’s first concern when looking at a salvage Lotus. The previous owner had this car built to the hilt with a ton of extreme mods. Late one evening, on a narrow back country road 2 big deer jumped in front of the car. The driver hit both the deer but in a delayed panic, over corrected and put the car sideways with the ass end down in the ditch. The road had no shoulder. It was just like a cliff off the pavement, so imagine the car sliding sideways, with the rear in the ditch. The passenger side floor, underneath of the sill, was sliding on the asphalt edge of the road. The pavement beating on the bottom of the car tore up the fiberglass sill cover, smashed the A/C lines and smashed up a bit of the underside of the aluminum tub. I bought the car from the previous owner to strip out all of the performance goodies and transfer them over to my other Exige. I also used the side door & the hardtop on my other Elise race car. I bought the car assuming that the tub was toast, and the leftovers would just be scrap metal, but upon further inspection, I realized that what I thought was tub damage was really just superficial and only aesthetically unpleasant. I got out the 4 screw jacks, laser & ruler and went to work to do a chassis straightness check. As per the guidelines of the Lotus Elise service manual. The manufacture has an allowable tolerance of only 2-MM. I checked each corner and came up with only a 1.34 mm deviation from perfect. Much to my excitement, I realized I had great chassis to use for building a track monster. After many restless nights of dreaming how I would design the cage, suspension, K-swap or not to K-swap, etc… reality began to set in on where this project would fall upon my list of other projects and life goals. Sadly, I realized the project would most likely sit for a very long time and probably never really happen, unless I could live to be a fit & flexible nonagenarian. So… all that being said, the tub is good. It will need a sub-frame because that got twisted in the wreck. I have it, but it’s scrap metal. The front & rear clams might be repairable or at least used for parts to repair another damaged clam. The engine cover is in good shape. The interior comes with the car as does a whole pile of parts that came off of it. There is no engine or transmission. No top. I do have another driver’s side door shell you can have. With all of the aftermarket parts readily available for these cars, it would be a fun project for some one that has the time. I will not part it out. If it doesn’t sell, I will put into long term storage in my warehouse, where I might come back to it someday.
UPDATE.. I have acquired a subframe in good condition. This part set me back 1200 bucks but I’m going to include it with the sale of this project.
Price: $8,995
More info: Listing has ended. Click to search on eBay for similar 2006 Lotus Exige (Affiliate link)
Seller's other items: clayman340
Location: Camden, North Carolina, United States
