You Desperately Need This Salvaged Lotus Elise That's Been Rebodied With Forward-Sliding Attack Doors

Odds are, if you've heard of the California-based coachbuilder Rezvani Motors, the car that comes to mind is the Rezvani Tank. But Rezvani does more than just rebody Jeep Wranglers for paranoid right-wingers hoping to live out their "Red Dawn" fantasies. It also sells a sports car called the Beast that's currently built on a C8 Corvette chassis, but previously used Lotus Elise and Ariel Atom chassis as its basis. And one lucky bidder over on Cars & Bids will soon take home one of only three Elise-based Rezvani Beast Alpha prototypes ever built. 

As you can see in the photos, few hints that the car you're looking at is a rebodied Elise remain, but what really sets the Rezvani Beast apart are its doors. Unlike conventional doors, they don't open out, and unlike supercar doors, they don't rotate up and out of your way. Instead, they slide forward, kind of like minivan doors, only they open in the opposite direction. Rezvani calls them SideWinder doors, and I guarantee they're the only thing anyone is going to want to talk about if they see you parked at the gas station. 

Are the forward-sliding doors going to be to everyone's taste? Of course not. But how many other sports can you buy that have sliding attack doors? None? Exactly. Every other automaker looked at that door design and passed for one reason or another, but not Rezvani. Only they have been brave enough to bring forward-sliding doors to the sports coupe segment, and that kind of courage deserves to be commended.

While the car shown here is officially a prototype, it's still a real car, and it's powered by a Honda-sourced turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engine that cranks out about 500 horsepower. Instead of the original sequential transmission, a five-speed manual has been swapped in, sending all that power exclusively to the rear wheels. The new body and doors probably add weight, but the Beast Alpha is still based on an Elise and therefore only weighs about 2,000 pounds. That should make this thing a delight in the corners, but it should also make it seriously quick in a straight line. 

That said, there is one little red flag in the listing that may change your mind about bidding on this Beast Alpha prototype — technically, the car has a rebuilt title. According to the seller, though, it's not necessarily what you might assume. No one crashed the prototype, so you're good there. It's just that Rezvani tried to save a few bucks on the build and used a rebuilt Elise instead of a fresh one. Which wasn't necessarily a bad decision on the company's part, but it could definitely put a damper on the prototype's final sales price. 

Whether you're too sketched out by the car's rebuilt title or not, you have to admit this would be a heck of a fun car to drive. It's even still got the Elise's targa top, so you can enjoy open-air motoring. And while there are still a few days left on the auction, at the time of writing, bidding is only up to $42,000. That's not chump change, but it's still a heck of a lot less than you'd probably expect to pay for a rare supercar prototype with reverse minivan doors.