Welcome to LT Corey! Congrats on your Elise purchase! Be sure to check out the Elise buying guide at the top of the Elise forum. Once you've been a member three days and have ten posts you'll be able to send/receive PM and enter the Marketplace. GLWS!
Yes the Elise lens cover can be removed to be replaced. Some DIY look better than others.
Just look thru the Elise forum and you'll find plenty of unmolested HL photos.

 

The dealer said this is because someone had performed a headlight update on the car a while ago.

Not a deal-breaker, but it makes you wonder if other 'shortcuts' were done in the past. 🥴

Even the OEM 'seal' <--- note the quotes isn't the most secure or best-fitting...ours always looks as if it is about to fly off. (Fun to verify, LOL)

 

Does anyone have a close-up picture of an unmodified light with the lens still on?

Here is the 'fit' (again, quotes LOL) of our '05. The raised seal can be seen from the drivers seat.

HTH

Where is the car? I can kick tires as well as anyone, tho' my Elise experience is less than our Esprit knowledge.

 

It’s not the actual seal on the lens but where the lens housing meets the projector. I think the car may have had “halo’s” installed by someone who wasn’t detail oriented as I can see a bunch of silicone. I was looking for a closeup picture of the headlamps where the projectors are but with the lens housing in place. All the pictures I find are for replacing the projectors with LEDs so no good pics of the lens cover installed and the projectors.
Thanks,
Cheers,
Corey

 

They’re easy to remove and clean up. I too would see this as an indication of how the last owner maintained the car. You would benefit from digging deeper into the car to see if there are any other questionable things going on.

 

The car is being sold by a Lotus dealer, and when we looked at it this summer, there were a few items that included the typical stuff, based on my research, like the central lock controller being bad and a window regulator. The central lock controller took a while for them to get, but both were taken care of.

The car seemed to drive fine once I squeezed myself into it, though I had never driven an Elise before for comparison. I was surprised by how linear the power is on the Lotus; I didn't expect that for a Toyota engine. The suspension seemed tight and ok, and there weren't any unexpected noises from an almost 20-year-old car. For comparison, my 2004 996 GT3 seems about as noisy and has been so since new, but I do have about 10k fewer miles on it than this Elise. The one disappointment is the shifter, but I think my son wants to put a gated one on, which I think would solve some of the inprecision in the shifter mechanism.

In the end, it's my son's car, but as any car-nut father wants, I would like to make sure he is getting the best for his money.

 

Even the factory ones have visible silicone. Without pictures, we can't say if that one is better or worse than OE

 

There are HID and LED retrofit kits available for the early Elise, so this may have been done by the PO. If it was just to add halos, then you could easily remove them and do the upgrade yourself to remove the silicone and upgrade lighting at the same time. Pretty easy DIY.

 

The aftermarket shifters like my ShiftR111 feel incredible. Very mechanical with positive tactile engagement in each gear. Not gated, but feels like one. I’d recommend this upgrade to anyone looking at an Elise.

 

Stiffer engine mounts also did a lot for eliminating sloppiness for me

 

+1 on the shiftr111.. The shiftr111
makes it very predictable and offers a lot of adjustments to get it just right. After I played with a few settings on mine, I’m loving it.

 

There was a recall at some point in the headlights that required a shade be added to the projector and siliconed in place.

can you post a picture?

 

Well yesterday we finalized the deal and my my son’s picked up his new to him Elise from Victory Lotus.

Didn’t get a chance to get a lot of pics yet. We will do that next weekend but here is the car and also a pic of the silicon I was taking about in the headlamps. On further inspection it seems just to be a bad silicon job on a set of Halo’s. We will throw the car up next weekend on the lift and get the headlamp covers out to clean up.

 

We will throw the car up next weekend on the lift and get the headlamp covers out to clean up.

Have fun.

You WILL need to have the front wheels removed...

Looks like a 4 post storage lift in the pictures.

If you have a 2-post lift be careful of the lifting position. Too little weight on the front can make them 'tippy'. 🤪



Hopefully you have run across this Topic:

https://www.lotustalk.com/posts/5894756/

you cannot, absolutely cannot, let anyone not intimately familiar with the car try to jack it up or put it on a lift, it is non obvious to even good mechanics who only work on normal cars. If they do not drop it on its ass, they will crush the fiberglass sills or dent the undercarriage.

 

Beautiful color. Enjoy.

 

Congrats on your Elise purchase. Here's a present S2 Service Manual http://www.robmaroc.com/documents/2004-2012 Elise Exige Service Manual.pdf

 

One more thing I noticed when I drove the Elise yesterday. They must have tightened something up. The shifter felt much better than when we 1st test drove it.