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That's the old Elise. The newer one is around 2000, but it's still a great car even if the pedals are a little crowded. But that's my point about the Road Runner—it's body on frame, a huge car with a giant iron engine, and the slightly lighter twin to the Dodge Charger of Dukes of Hazards fame. With all that new technology, the physically much smaller Camry is the same weight. A lot of that is government mandated safety junk and the rest is feature bloat. My stupid Mazda3 weighs more than my Legacy wagon. Why can't there be more cars engineered intelligently like the Lotus? I don't need or want all the crap they stick in cars today. Hell, I don't even need all the safety gear. As long as the gas tank is pretty secured so I don't burn alive in a crash, I'll take my chances. Where's the waiver I can sign? The most fun cars I had was my lightweight early '80's Subarus. No power anything, but I could roll down all 4 windows from the driver's seat and you knew the air pressure was low when the steering got heavy, foot to the floor driving got 30 mpg (even overloaded running near redline in top gear for hours on end), the chassis took amazing abuse, and a blind monkey with 3 tools could fix it on the rare occasion something went bad. It wasn't fast, but it was cheap, worry free, handled surprisingly well (with more feedback than you can get in most so-called sports cars today), and was fun. Much of that was due to the light weight.
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