A sports car that almost makes you want to break out your Birkenstocks to drive...

The motto of Lotus engineering has always been "performance through light weight." Not only has this created some great handling cars in the years since its founding by Colin Chapman, it has made them relatively fuel efficient.

For the 2008 British Motor Show, Lotus is set to take this inadvertently green approach further by taking some deliberate steps to make a more ecological friendly automobile and introducing their concept car, the Lotus Eco Elise. Composite body panels and the seats are made of hemp. Those two rectangles on the roof? Solar panels to power the electrical systems. And if you thought Lotus couldn't make the Elise any lighter, they somehow managed to shave off an additional 70 pounds off the weight.

The dream lives on. Sigh.

On a side note, this is one of a few new concept cars I've seen incorporating solar panels. Mercedes-Benz has a rumored model with solar panels incorporated into its roof to power the air conditioning system to cool off the car while it's parked. Most of the Kool-Aid Gang probably remembers a certain VW Rabbit running around our old stomping grounds with a unwieldy solar panel on it's top that essentially did the same thing. Crazy how long it's taken for a relatively ingenius idea to finally start making its way into consumer products.