I've seen a couple from that guy and AFAIK he's now got the car sorted but it took a while. I also read that he'd bought the car with those known problems and so it was below the market value at the time. So whilst it sounds bad and Lotus were clearly not helping, he did know what he was getting into.
There's been similar cases on the Pistonheads forum. It would seem that Lotus offloaded a pile of cars through a UK dealership which is basically a reseller (box-shifter !) of any make and they just take cars into their warehouse & don't offer test drives. You just turn up, wander around and either buy or not on what you see. They're open in saying they won't rectify any faults, you have to go to an official Lotus dealer and claim on the warranty from Lotus. I'm not sure that even complies with UK selling laws but no doubt they've got legal advice on it.
One long running thread is a guy who bought one which only came with 1 key and he's had real trouble in sourcing a second key. That's crazy, you'd expect Lotus would just hand over a second one but it didn't seem to work like that.
Hence Emira prices tumbled over the last couple of months over here. The base car is £81k new but £60k at less than 12 months old with 2k miles on them. Quite a drop and you have to wonder why someone is offloading at these sorts of losses.
Get a good one and it's great, everyone loves them. The downside is if something goes wrong the parts supply seems very random and some of the faults that have surfaced shouldn't be there if you're competing with Porsche. For example, Lotus have made and painted fibreglass cars for 60 years but now they're getting paint blister faults which apparently end up replacing the complete door ? Water getting in and drowning the electrics ? HVAC not working ? huh ?
As you know I'm a long term Lotus nut but frankly I can't see how they'll survive if they carry on like this. You'd accept it at £25-30k but at £84k on the road you'd expect it to work and not be spending time in the dealer.
Brian
