The original Lotus Elise is great. Sure, you might have to have two of your ribs removed to get in and out of it, and collision repair is heinously expensive, but it’s a riot. An ultra-lightweight two-seater from arguably the start of the last great era of analog driver’s cars. However, it’s not the sort of car designed for questionable terrain, but now there’s a solution. This is the Get Lost Project Safari, and it seems like a distilled essence of off-road sports car.
Get Lost is the brainchild of world-renowned automotive photographer GF Williams, a Lotus aficionado and one skilled operator behind the lens. At first glance, it makes a ton of sense. Sports cars offer a great form factor for the city because they’re small and nimble, but city roads are awful. From Los Angeles to Toronto to London, poorly patched-up stretches of pavement will rattle your fillings in anything track-focused, and that’s before we get into the deterioration of scarcely maintained backroads.
To fight back against potholes, the Get Lost Project Safari features an extra 3.9 inches of ride height thanks to all-terrain tires and new suspension that’s said to keep the responsiveness you’d expect from an Elise while adding compliance. Of course, those big all-terrains have resulted in some clamshell modifications, and the result is pretty dang neat. Check out the spare tire mounted in the rear deck.
Another party piece is an enormous roof scoop, so induction noise should come from directly over your head. As for the engine, it’s reportedly a new powertrain, although details are scarce. Still, something like a Toyota 2ZZ-GE or Honda K20 would be a huge upgrade over the original Rover K series engine, which was known for head gasket issues. Also on tap, a limited-slip differential to really put the power down on dusty corner exits, a hydraulic handbrake for fun, and rally lights to cut through the indigo of twilight. Really, the most controversial thing here is the headlights, which go slim and rectangular in round recesses, with the otherwise empty space filled with Miura-style eyelashes.
Despite all the alterations, one key thing remains essentially unchanged: the stiff, ultra-light extruded and bonded aluminum chassis. Even if you lift an Elise up on big tires, you’ll benefit from its construction regardless of which surface you’re on, and the exposed structure in the cabin still looks artful.
Best of all, if you want your own lifted Elise, you can have one built. Get Lost is now fielding deposits for the Project Safari, with builds starting later this year. Pricing hasn’t been announced and I doubt it’ll be cheap, but this thing looks like six figures’ worth of fun.
Top graphic credit: Get Lost
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“Best of all, if you want your own
liftedRUINED Elise, you can have one built.”There… fixed it for accuracy.
If you want an off-road vehicle, buy an off-road vehicle. Don’t give this company money to ruin the surviving Lotus Elises.
You throughout history…
“Best of all, if you want your own
389 V8RUINED Tempest, you can have one built.”There.. fixed it for accuracy.
If you want a sports car, buy a sports car. Don’t give Pontiac money to ruin a Tempest by making it a GTO.
…
“Best of all, if you want your own
1.6LRUINED Golf, you can have one built.”There.. fixed it for accuracy.
If you want a sports car, buy a sports car. Don’t give Volkswagen money to ruin a Golf by making it a GTI.
That’s a little unfair lol, I get that you’re saying we should preserve these cars, but also… if people want to make them their own, customize them, make something new and fun out of them, what’s the problem? I’m sure there’s no shortage of Lotuses sitting in temperature controlled garages somewhere in bone stock original condition waiting for auction in the future. These are car enthusiasts doing what car enthusiasts do: make things unique, make them their own. Why limit the vision to a strict interpretation of what a particular car is?
“ what’s the problem?”
The problem is the Elise, even in stock form, is a special car produced in relatively low volumes.
The regular Pontiac Tempest or VW Golf both were non-special daily drivers produced in much higher volumes than the Elise.
They made like 8,600 Series 1 Elises, 18 of which are on the UK AutoTrader right now. I’m sure there’s no shortage of them in the hands of collectors and/or purists. Meanwhile, for the, what, 50 people that will convert theirs? Probably just fine. These are cars for bringing people joy… which is what this kit is doing.
“ 50 people that will convert theirs?”
That’s 50 people too many Mister!!!
“They made like 8,600 Series 1 Elises”
And by comparison, they made 131,490 Pontiac Tempests:
https://forums.maxperformanceinc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=746721
And they made over 35 million VW Golfs.
https://www.nordenvw.ca/vw-golf-a-global-fave-how-many-are-there-in-the-world/
So 8600 Elises may sound like a lot to you, but it isn’t. In automotive terms, it’s a very small number… like Ferrari-level small.
Consider as well that the number of survivors decline every year due to accidents, getting worn out and scrapped and other reasons.
Hell… there are hundreds of thousands of Golf GTIs made… this company should make off-road rally versions of Golf GTIs instead. Far more of them out there.
And they are far less special.
I understand where you are coming from, but I drove a safari 911 a few years ago and my eyes were opened. It was 90% of the canyon carver that its stock sibling was and 200% better on rough pavement. The reality is that some people want to be able to take their sports car out and have fun on their local roads – which for many means less than ideal tarmac.. for those, I 100% get why this exists.
“…it’s reportedly a new powertrain, although details are scarce. Still, something like a Toyota 2ZZ-GE…”
The 2ZZ won’t fit in an S1, it’s probably the Honda engine, which fits just fine. Great engine.
The Rover K isn’t a bad engine, my 160 spec one didn’t have any head gasket issues in 9 years and 45,000 miles. It was hand built at Lotus though, rather than thrown together at Rover.
I used to run winter tyres on my S1 Elise and it was hilarious on snow. When grip is low you appreciate steering feel and chassis feedback even more. The only downsides were lack of ground clearance and the terrible S1 HVAC needed 15 minutes to demist the windscreen.
But the standard Elise had a great ride, and handled rough smashed up roads just fine. The Lotus test track back then was made from the crumbling 1940’s concrete of the old Hethel bomber runways.
I’m not sure the world needed a Safari Elise, but I’d definitely give it a sold hoon if given the chance.
This is cool, other than the dorky looking lights bolted to the front.
What a thoroughly stupid idea.
I oh, in sixth grade (age 12 or so) saw a Europa and I was totally entranced. The Esprit looked cool. But they have totally lost me since then. So, good luck, Get Lost. Which sounds like an admonition.
(nhrn)
I’d drive that for free.
I drive all over the country for work, and am from New England where we know a thing or two about bad roads. Never have I felt the need for anything more than a regular car with tires that AREN’T rubber bands stretched around dubs. And paying attention to the road in front of me, which of course means NOT being right up the ass of the car in front of me in traffic. If the roads are THAT bad, then that is what trucks/proper NOT car-based SUVs are designed for.
This is a Lotus ruined, and Colin Chapman is whirling in his grave like an F5 tornado.
A standard S1 Elise has 4” of tire sidewall front and back, and that is loads by modern standards.
If it had been closer to a rally prepped stratos I’d like it much more, but it’s not terrible. I just don’t think it’s quite rock crawler material as photographed.
It needs a small, lightweight, turbodiesel, such as an OM606. With mechanical injection, the possible fuel sources you can run it on greatly expand.
An expensive car designed by a photographer? Not if my man berries were in a vise.
I’m gonna be a stick in the mud and say that I really, fundamentally, dislike this. The safari trend is beyond tired, anyway, but I can think of no worse vehicle to make into an offroader than an Elise. They’re not exactly the most rigid, bulletproof vehicles ever made. Lightweight, nimble, and fast, yes, but they’re just completely and utterly wrong for this purpose. If you want to do a tube frame thing and stick an Elise body on it or whatever, then yes, but this is just nonsense.
I am right there with you. This is naff. I imagine the half-life of an Elise body subjected to anything other than normal pavement is measured in minutes.
Rover K series engines didn’t have a particularly deficient head gasket design; it was more that nearly every implementation of it had some weird quirk or twelve in the cooling system that made overheating a problem. It was a pretty innovative engine and made good power and torque for the time.
Source: head gasket number 5 and one skim away from a new head…
These cars are way too fragile for this to be anything more than appearance and will definitely need more power to not lose performance from the larger tires, maybe a stronger transmission. I never was one for fads.
It gives off a Stratos vibe which I find I like.
Off-rotus sounds like something that can go wrong with your balls when you get past a certain age. “I’ve got the off-rotus so now I have to wear this special underwear.”
Sidewall = no
This is pure silliness and I love it.
So if there are all these Lotus Elise’s that are totaled because of cracked clams, where is the thriving aftermarket in rebody kits? Say a kit to look like a Fiero or something.
I love it! A body kit to make a Ferrari 308 look like a Fiero would be absolutely epic.
Fibreglass is infinitely repairable. It’s already made from tiny bits glued together. The expensive bit is the labour required to fix it, which can exceed the value of the car. Which means they get written off, then fixed up by people willing to do the work for free.
My S1 Elise had been in a rear end crash at some point before I bought it, and I only found the extensive rear clamshell repairs after I took the rear clam off. It looked perfect from the outside.
My drift MX5 had a fibreglass front bumper, and a couple of times a year I’d clip a wall or something with it, and have to bond it back together with resin and Kevlar. It takes a lot of work to repair it perfectly, but not much work at all to make it look OK from 20 feet.
Well Lotus has it in its DNA to look at any piece of material and think whether it should be eliminated, or should it take on the function and stress of some other piece of material that has been eliminated.
Upper A arm and anti roll bar, let’s combine them! Let’s stress everything!
I sometimes wonder what a Lotus designed pickup truck would be like since a pickup and a Lotus have totally different design philosophies.
I think Colin stayed awake at nights thinking that if any part wasn’t a critical point of failure, it was probably redundant and that situation needed to be remedied.
Oh, meandering off topic there — but on a Lotus, deciphering what is or is not structurally critical is not obvious. Like on a Seven where apparently the rivets wear out.
Lotus are happy to work on anything. They designed a shopping cart, it had five wheels. I’d love to see a Lotus pickup truck, but I suspect it would end up too expensive to use as a truck.
I suspect Colin stays awake at nights thinking he’d have been out of jail for decades by now and maybe faking his death wasn’t the best long term solution.
The highest selling price of a 1975 Lancia Stratos HF at auction over the last three years was $692,500
I need stupid money, and I need this!