Would You Be Interested in an Owner’s Car Section?
I’ve had several members ask about this over the years, and I’m curious what the broader community thinks.
One idea is to create a dedicated Owner’s Car section on LotusElan.net. Each car would have its own permanent home, a place to document the history and story of that individual Elan or Plus 2.
Each owner’s section could include things like:
A running restoration or ownership blog (vlog in written form).
Photos throughout the car’s life.
Service, maintenance, and restoration history.
Factory information and original specifications.
Ownership history (where known).
Interesting stories, road trips, and events.
Documentation, period photos, and memorabilia.
Modifications and upgrades over the years.
The long-term goal would be to preserve the history of each car, creating a resource that benefits not only the current owner, but also future owners and enthusiasts researching a particular vehicle.
To make the information easy to find, each vehicle could be tagged by:
VIN (Chassis Number)
Registration Plate (for UK cars, recognizing these may change over time)
Imagine buying an Elan ten years from now and discovering that previous owners had documented decades of its history on LotusElan.net. That could be an incredible resource for provenance, restoration, and preserving each car’s story.
What do you think?
Is this something you would use?
Would you maintain a page for your own car?
What information would you want to include?
Are there any features you’d like to see?
I’d love to hear your thoughts before investing the time to build it.
It would be very useful if it was an archive that could only be updated by the owner and couldn’t become cluttered by replies and comments well intentioned or not from other members.
I would certainly use it to document the history of my two Elans and provide details of ongoing maintenance and refinements.
That’s an interesting idea, and one I hadn’t considered.
I can definitely see the value of keeping each car’s history as a clean archive rather than having it evolve into a discussion thread. It would make it much easier for future owners—or anyone researching a particular car—to follow the story from beginning to end without having to sift through comments.
That raises another question on how people would prefer it to work.
Would you envision:
A single, editable post that you continually update over the years as your ownership and the car evolve, or
A topic where only the owner can post, allowing multiple chronological updates while preventing replies from other members?
The second option would read more like a journal, with maintenance updates, restoration milestones, and photos added over time, while still keeping the thread uncluttered.
I’d be interested in hearing which approach people would find more useful.
I think the idea of tying in identification numbers is great. I have a running thread on my ownership history of the car. Can existing threads be included somehow?
My immediate preference would be for a single editable post. Perhaps a framework could be provided so that important items such as vin numbers/registration plates are all displayed in a uniform fashion with a main photograph as a header. Then other content such as known history from our resident archivist @trw99 could be included before the owners own description of the vehicle and further photographs etc.
If possible it would be good to have photo links to owners cars rather than text, especially if more than one vehicle is owned.
Chronological updates would be more interesting for me as it would capture the evolution of the car’s story. It would also provide a reason to come back and read about that evolution. If it’s a single editable post, even if the owner keeps it up to date, as a reader how am I to know if it’s been updated since I last read it, and if it has, what changes were made?
Who has the intellectual rights to the information? It could, somehow, become monetised at some stage in the future by folk who may not share our enthusiasm, but be more interested in how they make a buck or three.
What is the long-term future for this site and therefore the data within it? I know this is a question Jeff has already considered and may have answered! But when we are all playing with harps on clouds above this mortal coil, it would be good to know that Jeff’s, as well as all our contributions, continue to inform the next generations of enthusiasts and historians.
Can this be policed, in some way? Why? Because it would be possible for some nefarious individual to make up the history of an Elan to substantiate their build up of a bitsa car, post it here and declare that the car was genuine, using this site as part of their proof. Bear in mind we no longer have access to the factory records via an archivist at Lotus.
Would we as readers/contributors actually have the time and interest to read everyone’s own Elan history? There are not many anoraks like me who would! So, if not, for whom and why would we be going to the trouble of recording all our goings on? (I am playing devil’s advocate here).
For my own part, I have built up and continue to, my own private register of all Elans, as some of you are aware. I have worked with Andy Graham over recent years to attempt to fill in the holes of the factory records, where they have been destroyed or are missing. It is a concern to me that when I shuffle off here all that data is passed on to a suitable person; but as I wrote, there are not many anoraks like me! I have already explored some avenues.
I welcome Jeff’s idea and would like to think, given the wonderful resource he has built with this forum, that it could form a logical home for mine, and indeed others, data, becoming a significant historical archive in its own right. However, I think we should consider this option carefully and be wary the potential potholes we could fall into.
@trw99 - Leave it to you to ask all the hard questions.
Tim and I have actually had several conversations over the years about what happens to our respective Lotus projects in the long term. (My children never inherited the Lotus bug. My oldest caught the car bug, but somehow ended up with Audis instead. I’m still trying to figure out where I went wrong as a parent.)
The reality is that the Lotus Elan community is simply too niche to ever be a significant commercial venture. The audience is small, and while there are opportunities to recover some costs, I don’t believe anyone is going to retire from serving this community. Buckland’s and Robinshaw’s books are probably the closest thing we’ve had to a commercial success, and I suspect neither author would describe them as a path to riches.
To your points:
Ownership of the information. The person who posts the content retains ownership of it. As with most forums, by posting you grant LotusElan.net permission to display and use that content. That has been part of our Terms and Conditions since the forum began in the late 1990s.
Long-term stewardship. My goal has always been for LotusElan.net to outlive me. Over the past year I’ve been taking steps toward transitioning the site into a non-profit organization so that it has a sustainable future independent of any one individual.
Authenticity of vehicle histories. This actually concerns me the least. If someone tried to invent the provenance of a car, I’d expect the community to challenge it fairly quickly. One of the strengths of this forum is the depth of collective knowledge. In the absence of an official Lotus archivist, enthusiasts like yourself have become the custodians of much of the surviving history.
Will people actually read them? I think they will—but perhaps not every car. The value isn’t that everyone reads every history. It’s that when someone is researching a particular Elan, considering buying it, or becomes its next owner, they have a permanent record to discover. In many ways, we’d be preserving each car’s story for the next generation rather than writing it for today’s audience.
One thought that has always appealed to me is the possibility that LotusElan.net becomes more than just a discussion forum. It could become the historical archive for the Elan and Plus 2 community—a place where the knowledge, documentation, and individual stories of these cars are preserved for decades to come.
Yes, Tim and I are the Elan nerds who think about how to make the collective wisdom of the community survive until the end of time… or at least past the end of our time.
Probably the most popular topic on here is “What did you do to your Lotus today?” With option 2 (the blog option) is there a danger that members will move away from posting on there to post only in their own personal section? Without duplicating word for word, some means of keeping “What did you do” relevant, would be preferable. It is the member interaction that makes elan.net so interesting. I’m probably overthinking it, but a “blog” section could dilute that interaction.
The other question that comes to mind is would an owner, current or new, have the function to hide/archive/delete their car’s section? Read into that “for whatever reason an owner might have”.
Perhaps VIN’s only being visible depending upon level of membership, and whether an owner has ticked show/hide VIN might deter the wrong 'uns out there.
There is also of course the Elan Registry that already lists the significant data. I’m not suggesting that it’s in competition with elan.net, but some of the data mentioned is already out there in the public domain.
I do welcome Jeff’s initiative; I’m just sounding a few things that come to mind.
I tend to agree with JohnCH here, and also share another poster’s concern about reducing activity in the forum area where comments and discussion occur.
Now, if the software would support a poster tagging certain posts such that they the get referenced or even brought into that poster’s car “blog”, I could see being beneficial. Ie., if I wanted to post in the “What did you do today” forum and tagged my post in a certain way that it populated my car blog… or similarly if I had a thread on a certain project or problem, I might want to tag certain posts within that thread to show up in my blog. Where this would fall short for me would be if I had to make multiple posts in different areas - as I’d always prefer the open forum for feedback than just the history blog.
