My speedo needle is bent too and the color of the tach and speedo needles has washed out to a light pinkish orange
And I don't leave the car out in the sun for any inordinate amount of time. It is definitely sun damage though.
You can see it pretty obviously in this picture. (Don't razz me about driving about driving and taking pictures - a friend of mine leaned in and took this pic with her phone)
I wonder if there is any way possible to get new needles? It looks like later models have more solid looking needles that are also more vibrant in color. It seems like the Stack company that made our clusters realized the problem and changed the design. Maybe the needles from an '06 and up would fit our '05 if they sold replacement needles separately? I tried once to contact Stack but didn't make any headway to finding anything out.
I also have the issue with my cluster where sometimes out of the blue, the whole cluster goes dead and the needles drop to zero. Then after driving along a while it just pops back to life. I believe that is the issue other Lotus owners have talked about where the soldered contacts behind the cluster have cracked and make intermittent contact. I'm going to be pulling my cluster out soon to check it out and try to re-solder the contacts. It would be great if at the same time I could replace the needles.