This $110,000 Lotus Elise Lightens Everything, Including Your Wallet – Jalopnik

Every day we wake up to a new and exciting way to spend a ton of money on an old, “redesigned” car. Usually these are just exercises where rich men bow down to each other. But sometimes there is someone who does something unique that deserves some attention, and maybe creates something worthwhile. InoKinetic’s new Lotus Elise 111RS is fast and friendly without resorting to massive horsepower increases and giant sticky tires. Instead, this car takes the Lotus philosophy to the extreme and remains as light as possible. If the car only weighs a little over 2,000 pounds, you don’t need much force to move it.

You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of InoKinetic, but the company is known in Lotus circles for building track and race-oriented components for the Elise and Exige. The company set out to build the ultimate Elise for the street, and the result is this $75,000 upgrade package. For that money you get a Mountune-built Toyota 2ZZ engine with 275 hp, upgraded suspension, brakes, gear lever, exhaust, updated gearbox and more. Every mechanical part has been modified to match InoKinetic’s vision, and the entire car has been rebuilt to drive like new. The company calls the finished car “the ultimate analog sports car.”

A car reviewer who has driven pretty much everything on the planet, Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire, had this to say about the car: “As a buzzing machine, this is incredibly fantastic.” To be fair, the standard Lotus Elise was already quite adept at delivering fizz, but it sounds like InoKinetic has stepped it up a few notches. Farah says the car costs around $110,000 with the parts installed, but there are all kinds of choice and choice components available from InoKinetic, so you can probably build one that’s a little less pricey – starting with just the engine, which will cost $15,000 on top of the price of a used Lotus. Farah’s conclusion after driving? “It’s one of the lightest and purest cars you can drive.”

A lot of custom cars feel like old cars with a lot of parts thrown at them, but the 111RS apparently feels much more cohesive, like it was designed to work together. There were plenty of opportunities for InoKinetic to screw up here, but it didn’t go too far. Is it possible that the old Lotus Elise has finally been perfected after almost 20 years of development? Judging from The Smoking Tire’s video, that certainly seems possible.

Paying $25,000 to $35,000 for a worn but complete Elise and giving InoKinetic an extra $75,000 for a complete overhaul is a lot of money. But there are limited options for cars that perform like this car for less money. The aforementioned Porsche GT3 will set you back at least a quarter of a million dollars, and even more for an RS model. Maybe a pure track car can deliver the speed and balance, but then you can’t take it on your favorite roads. By that calculation, this redesigned Lotus might actually be a bargain.