The Mazda MX-5 / Miata achieved something that no other car will - Iconic cars and engines #19

Today I will explain how the Mazda Miata / MX-5 achieved something that no other car ever has and no other car ever will.

Jinba ittai, which means person and horse as one, is a very important concept in Yabusame, Japanese mounted archery. It conveys a state in which horse and rider behave as one. There is no need for additional restraint or control inputs from the rider. The horse and the rider are connected to the point where it seems that they're effectively reading each other's minds. When this is achieved the rider's hands can be used to aim and shoot the bow instead of holding the reins.

This is the very idea that Mazda engineers chose as the guiding concept for the development of the Mazda MX-5. But saying that the unification of car and driver is something unique to Mazda would be a blatant lie. Many other manufacturers were doing this decades before Mazda without referencing horses or riders. And of course Mazda was very aware of this.

So Mazda bought and intimately studied this car, the Lots Elan, during the development process of the MX-5. And if you look at the two cars side by side the the inspiration behind the first generation of the Mazda MX-5 is obvious.

It may not be very familiar to young drivers and car enthusiasts today but the first generation of the Lotus Elan, made from 1962 to 1974, is remembered by many as the car that delivered truly incredible and unparalleled driving joy.

Back in the day car and driver described it like this:
"The Elan comes closer than anything else on the market to providing a Formula car for ordinary street use. And it fits like a Sprite, goes like a Corvette, and handles like a Formula Junior. Driving it is very simply another sort of automotive experience altogether. Most people tend to come back from their first ride a little bit glassy-eyed..."

One of the greatest car designers and engineers of all time, Gordon Murray said "Series 3 Lotus Elan... it's still, in my opinion, probably the best-handling sports car that's ever been made... If anybody wants to know what good steering is, just jump in the 60s Elan"

So Mazda took one of the best feeling and best handling cars ever made and ripped it off. Along the way they concocted some sort of horse and rider nonsense so it looks like their idea and that's it. End of story.

Actually no, to call the mx5 a copy would be missing the point. Over the years Japanese manufacturers have often inspired themselves by products of other countries, but never have these cars been just a copy. They were always much more.

A copy pales in contrast to the original. But the MX-5 does not. In fact the MX-5 has set and achieved a far more ambitious and difficult goal than the Lotus Elan.

To realize what that goal is we just have to ask the very obvious question. Which car had better sales? The original or the copy? Well, Lotus sold a bit over 12.000 Elans total. But Mazda sold more than 400.000 MX-5s and that's just the first generation alone. The combined number of all the generations amounts to more than million car sold making the MX-5 the best sold 2 seater convertible of all times.

The next obvious question is why? If the Elan made people tear up while driving, why didn't it take the world by storm. The reason is that the Elan was essentially a hand built car. It used a, for the time, revolutionary steel backbone chassis with a fiberglass body on top. This made it very light but it also made production expensive and slow. And even though Lotus used as many conventional Ford components as they could to keep the costs down the car was still expensive. You could buy two Mini Cooper S's for the price of One Elan. And this was just the initial underpowered Lotus Elan 1500, the more powerful editions that came would come close to the Jaguar E-type in price.

Now Mazda's goal was to preserve the epic driving joy and low weight of the Elan while making the car affordable, reliable and well suited for mass production. This is the equivalent of saying: I'm going to prepare myself to compete in the Olympics on a diet that consists exclusively of junk food.


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#d4a #miata #mx-5