Evaluation: Represented with 19,636 miles, and it doesn’t look like they we’re all racked up at track days. Good paint with no major blemishes. Clean wheels and fresh-looking tires but aged original brakes. Good interior with clean switches, good seats, and mild wear on those gigantic sills from getting in and out. Lightly used and still looks just as fun as when it left Hethel 15 years ago.
Bottom Line: This car is from the first year of the Exige in the US market, so it has the naturally aspirated version of the Toyota 2ZZ-GE engine (same as the Elise) rather than the supercharged 2ZZ that later came in increasingly powerful iterations of the Exige S. No matter, 190hp is still plenty in a car that weighs just a ton. And as modern cars with a driver-focused layout are selling well across the board, late-model Lotuses have benefitted in a big way with prices for the Elise and Exige inching up noticeably over the past year. This one brought a deservedly strong price for its well-kept, unmodified and low-mile condition, but it’s still a lot of fun per dollar even if it doesn’t sound fast on paper.
