But if you have time and money to burn, a Spyder can easily be turned into a cheap Elise provided you really dig into that suspension. The real question is: what do you want from the car? What will you do with it? Spyders arguably have the best handling of any 'cheap' car made within the last decade but they completely lack any storage space- a Miata is legitimately a more practical car. The Auto/SMT transmissions should be avoided particularly for scarcity of parts, despite the car going out of production ~10 years ago. Alternatively you can replace them every 100k miles that should prevent the issue. It’ll still have the main cat so you will pass OBD tests and emissions tests. The fix for the cats is to take the catalyst out of the close coupled cats. I bought my first one with it already having achieved that amazing feat and then parted out the wrecked smt car to fix the blown motor manual car. Once you do that, everything should be properly aligned and you can tighten.

First, take off your hardtop, loosen the bolts for the 2 rear brackets, put your top back on, latch the latches, and then retighten the bolts. Those flecks of ceramic then work their way into the cylinders which leads to catastrophic oil consumption and rod knock. Spy2K, sounds like your hardtop mounts are out of alignment and you probably need to repeat the installation alignment steps. That then lets some pressure build up in the exhaust and when the motor is shut off a tiny bit of catalyst can be blown back into the exhaust passages of the cylinder head. They break apart and clog up the main cat. The cats - there are two tiny close coupled cats that are just a few inches from the cylinder head. But f you’re happy to wrench on it for a few hours and sell some excess parts on eBay you might be golden! It’s tight and it’s definitely a project so if you’re just looking for a fun car to buy and drive I recommend passing. You can even do that with the transmission in the car no need to pull engine or trans. If you buy the car cheap you can convert the existing transmission to manual shift and sell the smt parts for more than it costs to do the manual conversion. However!! That opens an opportunity for you. I just parted out a wrecked smt (the auto) car and made over $1500 selling just the smt control stuff. Get around 100k miles on it and expensive parts start failing. But the auto is actually a computer controlled manual and is pretty bad even when functioning 100%. Everything else on the car is great or can be addressed.

2001 toyota mr2 spyder hardtop