Lotus Exige S1 | PH Auction Block
All Exiges are special - but this one is yet to cover 5,000 miles...
It can often feel like we’ve seen it all in auction listings and classified ads. One owner from new, ten owners from new, no owners from new; 10,000 miles, 200,000 miles, no miles; all the options, no options, a never-before-seen option. ‘Unrepeatable’ in the search bar throws up dozens of cars; ‘bespoke’ yields thousands. It’s so easy to search for so many cars these days, that genuinely unrepeatable seems almost impossible in 2025.
We might just have the car in the PH classifieds, though. The original Exige is a Lotus icon, rarer and rawer than any that followed; more extreme even than the Elise, really, only offered with the spicy K Series tune and always a faff to enter and exit. No easy days with the roof off here, of course. But the Exige was even more thrilling than the Elise, too, the honey-I-shrunk-the-Group-C-racer look absolutely translating to a road and track experience blessed with abundant grip, feel, performance and excitement.
For most folk, the Elise was exhilarating enough entertainment, and offered that roof-off dimension. Moreover, with track days yet to fully take off at the turn of the 21st century as well, numbers were pretty small for the Exige. That and Lotus making them for just a year, ahead of S2 Elise production. The total was around 600. In the quarter of a century since, plenty have been crashed, bashed or had the engine swapped; while never as cheap as Elise, as recently as 2014 they were little more than £20k. Not much less than the £32,995 asking price, and the appeal wouldn’t have needed much explaining. In 2020, Lotus Silverstone had the very first Exige for sale at £45k.
This one is arguably even more special. Because in 25 years, three owners before the current keeper and with all the temptation that must come from having one of Lotus’s finest modern driver’s cars, it’s covered fewer than 5,000 miles - 4,597, to be precise. There can’t have been any for sale with so few for 20 years. And that isn’t with an Audi engine, or Honda K swap, or a host of track-ready modifications; this is an Exige S1 as it was in 2001, with just a Larini exhaust that’s altered from original spec. That hardly looks any different anyway. The brake pads are showing just 10 per cent wear, the interior really is factory fresh, and there’s been one MOT advisory. Ever. Which was for a full-length undertray, aka just the flat floor underneath an Exige.
It’s a museum-quality car, really, and what an exhibit it could be. More than a few would surely pay to gawp at the wonderfully spartan interior, complete with seemingly unused harnesses, the Stack dials and a wand of a gearlever, the engine stuffed up against the bulkhead and the beautiful proportions. It can easily be forgotten just how pretty the Exige is, with so much attention paid to how well it drives.
There’s nothing to stop the victorious bidder enjoying this car as intended, either. While use has been sparing over the years, it hasn’t been non-existent, and there’s a lot of recent servicing as well. Every single year of this decade it has been treated to specialist attention, even with just a handful of miles covered. It’d probably be worth a cambelt change for those really keen on driving, just to be sure; otherwise, the Exige seems fit as a fiddle.
What an experience it promises to be as well. An Elise - PH’s best sports car ever - but even more so: more power, more grip, more speed. Even if it’s just restricted to B-road blasting, this Lotus promises to be a joy like little else. Subsequent Exiges became more potent still, but the immediacy and immersion of the original take some beating.
Indeed, the seller only has their car up for auction because recent surgery makes driving it too difficult; as a Lotus Owners Club member for 25 years, they surely would have kept hold of this one indefinitely if at all possible. Their loss is another PHer's considerable gain, because (you knew it was coming) opportunities like this really are very rare indeed. Bidding kicks off on Thursday.
My S2 is what most people would consider "high mileage" for an Elise and it's only done 72k over 20 years. You can see it too, it's mechincally sound enough (although I think the final remaining original engine mount needs replacing) but it really needs a complete interior retrim; these cars are not really built to put a lot of miles on.
Essentially if you try to use them like you'd use a normal car, everything on an Elise should be considered consumable.
However, as mentioned above, the purchaser is going to pay a premium for the low miles, then do what, not use it or pay more to recommission it so that they can use it. If the purchaser intends to drive it, a higher milage without the low milage premium would be a better purchase.
May be this will go into a museum or car collection and not be used, which would be a waste (in my opinion)?
My S2 is what most people would consider "high mileage" for an Elise and it's only done 72k over 20 years. You can see it too, it's mechincally sound enough (although I think the final remaining original engine mount needs replacing) but it really needs a complete interior retrim; these cars are not really built to put a lot of miles on.
Essentially if you try to use them like you'd use a normal car, everything on an Elise should be considered consumable.
This one seems to have gone 10 years without a service at one point and recently just been driven to the MOT/service centre annually and then put away again
As long as they're kept dry, Elises don't seem to mind not being used; they don't even particularly mind not being serviced (although the VHPD might be different in that regard). They do mind covering significant mileages.
My S2 is what most people would consider "high mileage" for an Elise and it's only done 72k over 20 years. You can see it too, it's mechincally sound enough (although I think the final remaining original engine mount needs replacing) but it really needs a complete interior retrim; these cars are not really built to put a lot of miles on.
Essentially if you try to use them like you'd use a normal car, everything on an Elise should be considered consumable.
I replaced the steering rack with a quick rack using a slight knock as the excuse, but it wasn’t strictly necessary since there was no play. Also, the throttle body was a little sticky due to notching of the bore as a consequence of the way that the return spring eccentrically loads the butterfly. There’s a well-described modification that overcomes what’s essentially a design fault, but I just replaced it with a larger bore throttle body that has a different design return spring.
The only true fault has been the gauge cluster dropping out intermittently. Again, a common problem, the tachometer, speedometer and fuel gauge stop reading temporarily. It’s fairly simple to fix by dismantling the cluster and reflowing the solder at the base of a socket on the PCB.
Collectively, our English cars (Lotus and Jaguar) have been far more reliable and required far fewer consumables than the Germans (BMW, Audi and Mercedes)!
I know because I've done it. My Elise has been my commuter car for the last 18 years. Not much has broken, but bits simply wear out. If I wanted the car to be perfect, I would have replaced or refreshed every single interior component by now. Except the heating knobs curiously, which are still like-new.
ETA: At some point in the next few years I'll take it off the road for a while and treat it to a proper refresh, but I suspect the bill for doing so will head into 5 figures even doing a lot of the work myself.
My Z4M is 20 years old next year and approaching 100k miles. I’ve owned almost as long as you’ve had your Elise and it has had a hard life that has included a lot of track miles. Now, it really needs an investment of time and money to address a few cosmetic issues and general wear and tear, as well as preventive maintenance such as replacing the bearing shells. My Lotus is a year older and has somewhat fewer miles, but it carries its age far better than my Zed. It really doesn’t need anything spent on it at the moment.
That said, I just spent a couple of days stripping everything out of the interior to replace the cheap plastic trim with CF. I had to scrub 20 years of grime from behind trim pieces, within the dash and under the seats etc. It was amazing how much tar-like residue there was in the ventilation ducts behind the dash trim!
(Rhetorical comment - I don t need the usual responses if they might work long hours, could have been a health issue etc)
Hope the new owner enjoys putting lots of miles on while they still can.
My Z4M is 20 years old next year and approaching 100k miles. I ve owned almost as long as you ve had your Elise and it has had a hard life that has included a lot of track miles. Now it really needs an investment of time and money to address a few cosmetic issues and general wear and tear, as well as preventive maintenance such as replacing the bearing shells. ]
The bodywork needs minor attention too because small car-park dings have cracked the fibreglass and the nose has been grounded enough times to have worn through the under-side (which is unavoidable if you actually use the car as a car because quite a lot of perfectly normal looking roads have dips severe enough to ground the nose on, especially pulling out of side-roads).
Actually running costs have been astonishingly low, but the flip-side of that is that things which would usually not be considered consumables have been... consumed.
ETA: Fortunately the car is extremely easy to work on, because paying someone to keep one in perfect condition over any significant mileage would be pretty eye-watering!
(Rhetorical comment - I don t need the usual responses if they might work long hours, could have been a health issue etc)
Hope the new owner enjoys putting lots of miles on while they still can.
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