Some food for thought.
The Lotus Elise, holy grail of small roadsters, has a roof that removes, rather than folds, so I assume you can't open the top while sitting in the car. When it removes, it uses up much of the trunk (which is only four cubic feet to begin with). Yet I have never once heard a thread about a Lotus Elise go on a tangent about its cargo space. To compare, that's ALL people ever say about the Solstice GXP and Sky Red Line. Why the discrepancy?
You raise a good point, Mitlov. However, few articles I've read about the Elise suggest it's anything but a raw, track-ready performance machine. To that end, one expects compromises (bumpy, loud, contankerous in some ways) because it is the best machine for the task it was designed for, short of an Ariel Atom. The Solstice -- even in GXP guise -- is not raw and sporting enough to pull the "true track-ready car" excuse -- especially when Pontiac claims to target the likes of Miatae, Z4s and 350Zs as their direct competitors.
Sandman, it's unfair to say that we're critical of the Solstice / Sky because it's a domestic. You know I'm open-minded enough to applaud great cars when it's warranted, but you can't deny that GM seems to have simply pulled the Solstice out of the oven before the engineers had fully baked it. That top design is simply silly in this day and age. The Corvette is a world-class sports car. I'd do many awful things to have a new C6. Nobody seems to understand the full-szie pick-up market the way the domestic makers do (the new Sierra / Silverado? Truck masterpieces). Even the little neon SRT-4 was remarkable for all its faults because it was dedicated to being the meanest, baddest performance economy car around and succeeded. The Solstice is not a stand out in anything even if it does a number of things pretty well.
There's no doubt in my mind that the GXP is a remarkable performance machine and is a lot of fun to drive. And, following James' praises of driving the car (indeed, very high praise from a hard-drivin' S2000 owner!), I'm willing to heap even more kudos on GM for producing a legitimate sports car -- and at what seems to be decent value.
BUT, if the competitors can produce fun-to-drive, sexy sports roadsters that are reliable, have functional cargo space AND easy-to-operate tops, then there's no excuse for GM to have not been able to do the same.
