Owning a road-going Lotus can be described as an ethereal handling experience with a gravy ladle full of aggravation poured on top of it.  The cars are beautiful, the handling is sublime, and the build quality is often as questionable as the car’s reliability.  No vice is free in life.  However, there is a cheat to all of this.  Chapman designed the Lotus Seven as a race car with just enough tacked on to make it street-legal.  Therefore, there is less to fall off and more of the addictive, agile handling that Lotus owners will do anything to enjoy.  It is even better that several companies without the word Lotus in their title have produced quality replicas like this 1974 Super Seven for sale on Craigslist in Sonoma, California.  With a Toyota inline four-cylinder engine and a Toyota five-speed transmission, this potentially reliable Lotus knockoff (did I just write that?) is being offered for $15,000.  Is it worth it?  Thanks to numskal for this awesome find!

While Colin Chapman gets a lot of flack for building fragile sports cars, he should also get credit for the elegant simplicity that came along with his obsessive excommunication of weight in his designs.  When the first Lotus Seven rolled off the production line in 1957, it was a car boiled down to the essentials: a stiff chassis with a proper suspension, an engine, a stout transmission and rear end, and the bare minimum of items to make the car street-legal and survivable from a driver and passenger perspective.  Lotus ended up producing four different series of Sevens.  Each enjoyed more horsepower and issues such as front-end lift at high speed were tackled.  A heater was even added late in the production run.  Interestingly, most of the cars produced for the British market were sold as kits to partially escape the taxes levied on new cars in that country at the time.

Thousands were sold by Lotus to the faithful.  You could call these customers resilient as well.  Make no mistake.  This is not the car that you want to take on a long trip with a significant other who enjoys the creature comforts in life.  Weighing somewhere around 1,500 lbs, with a maximum height in the neighborhood of 36 inches, there are compromises made for performance.  The driver and passenger sit in a very narrow cockpit separated by the transmission and driveshaft tunnel.  Your legs are straight out, and your rear end has to fit into a narrow seat that is only rivaled by the torturous arrangements provided by airlines when flying coach or the contorted confines of a modern arena seat for a concert or sporting event.  There is no air conditioning other than wind wings, maybe some heat, and putting the top up requires assembling an Erector Set of bows and skinning them with a rudimentary top.  Have I mentioned the ill-fitting side curtains yet?  The good news was that the small fuel tank forced the driver to take occasional breaks and allowed the passenger to escape without jumping into traffic.  Yet it was that go-cart-like handling that couldn’t be found anywhere else that made drivers fall in love with the Seven.

While Lotus moved on from the Seven in 1973 and passed on building rights to Caterham Cars, others took notice and began to make replicas of his Spartan masterpiece.  In fact, over 160 companies have done so with varied levels of success.  The 1974 Super Seven you see here is one of those replicas.  According to the seller, the car was produced by Super Seven Sports Car Company of Ontario, Canada.  It is powered by one of Toyota’s venerable 1,600cc inline four-cylinder engines and backed with a Toyota T-50 5-speed manual transmission.  While the ad leads us to believe that the powertrain was from a 1968 Toyota, research says that the T-50 five-speed first made its appearance in 1980.  Perhaps the car was updated in the past.

It is mentioned in the ad that the car was a barn find.  You also have to assume that a car like this was probably owned by someone mechanically inclined.  It is reasonable to assume that it was updated and repaired as needed to keep it on the road.  The seller tells us that it has a Toyota rear end, electronic ignition, two Weber carburetors, QE1 shocks, a new battery, and a set of new Toyo tires.  We are told that it runs well but still has a few undisclosed issues.

The $15,000 asking price may or may not be reasonable due to this not being an actual Lotus or Caterham product.  Hopefully, we have a Lotus expert or two who can comment about the company that made this kit and let us know their reputation among Lotus fans.  As it sits, the car looks to be a fun, reliable representation of a Colin Chapman masterpiece.  Having a Toyota drivetrain only makes things better if you like your drives to be free of forced roadside stops.  There is a lot to like here if you don’t care who made it.