Rezvani Motors built exactly three prototypes of its Elise-based Beast Alpha, and one of them is sitting on Cars & Bids right now with bidding at $42,000. That number will climb. But probably not as high as you’d think, because this particular prototype carries a rebuilt title, and the story behind it says more about Rezvani than the car itself.
The California coachbuilder is best known for the Rezvani Tank, an armored Jeep Wrangler rebody aimed at the kind of clientele who treat apocalypse prep as a lifestyle brand. But Rezvani also makes a sports car called the Beast, which in its current form rides on a C8 Corvette platform. Before that, it used Ariel Atom and Lotus Elise chassis. This particular car dates from the Elise era.
Strip away the bodywork and you’d recognize the bones. A Honda-sourced turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder punches out roughly 500 horsepower, routed through a five-speed manual swap to the rear wheels only. The car tips the scales at around 2,000 pounds. On paper, that power-to-weight ratio puts it in genuinely exotic territory.
But nobody is going to talk about the engine. They’re going to talk about the doors.
Rezvani calls them SideWinder doors, and they are unlike anything else in production or prototype automotive history. They don’t swing out. They don’t scissor up. They slide forward along the body, like a minivan door running in the wrong direction.
The visual effect is somewhere between concept car theater and a Bond villain’s daily driver. Every other manufacturer in the world looked at forward-sliding doors and decided they weren’t worth the engineering headaches. Rezvani went ahead and built them anyway.
Whether that qualifies as courage or stubbornness depends on your perspective. The doors make the Beast Alpha a conversation piece. They also represent a mechanical system with no aftermarket support, no common repair knowledge, and no second source for parts. Owning this car means trusting a niche California builder’s proprietary door mechanism for the foreseeable future.
Then there’s the rebuilt title. The seller says nobody crashed it. Rezvani simply started the build with a salvaged Elise rather than a clean one, presumably to keep prototype costs down.
That’s a practical decision for a small company experimenting with a new platform, but it leaves the finished product in a gray area that will haunt resale. Collectors want clean provenance. A rebuilt title on a one-of-three prototype is the kind of asterisk that shaves real money off the final hammer price.
The Elise’s targa top survives under the new bodywork, so open-air driving remains an option. The interior is sparse in a way that feels honest rather than cheap. This was always a car built around the driving experience, not luxury appointments.
At $42,000 mid-auction, someone is going to get a genuinely rare machine for a fraction of what a clean-titled, production-spec Beast commands. The question is whether “rare” and “fun to drive” outweigh the practical realities of maintaining a hand-built prototype from a tiny automaker, complete with doors that no mechanic on earth has seen before.
For the right buyer, someone who wrenches their own cars, doesn’t care about resale, and wants to show up at cars and coffee with the most interesting thing in the lot, this is almost irresistible. For everyone else, it’s a fascinating piece of evidence that small automakers will try things the big companies won’t. Sometimes that produces brilliance. Sometimes it produces forward-sliding doors on a salvage-titled Lotus.
The auction has a few days left. Bring your sense of adventure. And maybe a backup plan for door repairs.
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