EliseInfo.com

Are you looking for a particular part for your Elise or Exige? Or, just curious how everything fits together? Lotus publishes a part number guide, with exploded views of different areas of the car, and with the part number for each part shown. They were kind enough to hand out CDs with this PDF for free at a Club111 event a year or so ago; you can find the PDF available for download in EliseInfo’s gallery section here.

Lotus Cars is having a contest; the lucky winner will get an all expenses paid trip for two to California to enjoy private wine tasting and three nights deluxe accommodations in Napa Valley. Oh, and of course, the rental car they give you…will be a Lotus Elise! Yes, you get to enjoy the fantastic California back country in the world’s finest sports car. To enter the contest, visit their website here. (via EliseTalk)

A heavily modified (obviously) Lotus Elise will be competing in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, where the autonomous vehicle will need to maneuver through an urban setting complete with traffic, intersections, traffic circles, etc…and will also have to park itself! The car is being entered by the Insight Racing Team, a collaboration between North Carolina State University, Insight Technologies, Lotus Engineering, and the Advanced Vehicle Research Center (AVRC). Ironically, they chose to modify one of the smallest and lightest cars available in the US, after using one of the largest and heaviest (a Suburban) in the last competition (though in all fairness, the last competition was offroad)! (via Physorg.com). Read more at technicianonline.
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Over at EliseTalk, there’s a car rental company that decided to sell one of its rental fleet Elises. The thing is, they’ve only had the car a month or so. An employee from Lotus Cars USA posted to the discussion thread, saying that the cars had to be in service for a minimum of ten months. S/he went on to explain about an interesting aspect of rental cars, which I’ll copy into the extended version of this post. The actual post has since been deleted by the moderators of EliseTalk, as discussions about cars for sale are not allowed in the for sale thread. The edited thread can be viewed here if you’re interested.
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Composite World (not a very creative name, huh) has an interesting article about Lotus using plastics in a vehicle’s crash structure. Hopefully all you EliseInfo readers already know that the Elise makes great use of this up front, where a glass fiber composite crash structure lies ready to dissipate a huge amount of energy to protect the car’s occupants. You can read the article over at Composite World.
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From those hilarious blokes at Top Gear comes a photo gallery of ‘carbage’, or in other words, cars that are garbage (such as the odd creation pictured here). Check it out!

According to The Car Connection, Lotus will be revealing a new car at the LA auto show. My guess is it’ll be the 2007 Elise that meets US bumper standards, but other possibilities are the Exige S (though that car has already been unveiled), or their new mid-range four seat car, due to arrive in 2008 or so. (via EliseTalk)

Many Elise owners have experienced occasional stalling, usually when the engine is cold. The leading theory was that the throttle quadrant was not properly adjusted, and this did prove to be the case for most of the cars exhibiting these symptoms. The rest gradually cured themselves, the problem went away and was thus attributed to the ECU needing to learn and adapt to the engine and environment. Well, some people at Pico Technology did a very detailed analysis of the problem, and found that corrosion in the throttle position sensor was actually to blame! During normal use, the nature of the TPS ensured that this corrosion would eventually be scraped away, thus making it appear like the ECU was learning, when in reality it was anything but. You can find the article here. (via EliseTalk)
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Someone over on EliseTalk made up a batch of embroidered short sleeve t-shirts with the Lotus logo on them. While probably not technically OK for them to be doing so, Lotus has been doing a horrible job of offering such merchandise for sale in this country, and until they do, I’ll happily help promote grassroots efforts such as this! The shirts are available in black only; for more info see this thread.

Someone at Audiworld posted a lot of really good, high resolution F1 pictures from this season, many of which would make great desktop photos. They’re free to download and can be found at the link above. (via EliseTalk)