Hey, whatever happened to the Mazda Miata? Haven’t seen one lately? Take another look; there are hundreds of thousands of them on the road. The MX-5 Miata is the best-selling, convertible two-seat sports car in the history of the universe. What a mouthful. And it’s true.
Ever since its launch in 1989, it has been the leading sports car in the world. The Miata, whose name basically means “reward” in German, was thought up by an American named Bob Hall. He was working for Motor Trend Magazine back in the 1970s when he met two key figures in Research and Development at Mazda.
They asked him what kind of car Mazda should develop and he basically told them that they should make an affordable roadster or sports car. A few years later he was hired at Mazda in the product planning department and the two Japanese men he had given his idea to, asked him to develop it. That was 1982 and Hall went on to work a on the project at Mazda Design Studios in Southern California and in 1989 the Mazda MX-5 Miata rolled onto dealer showrooms across the country and thousands of customers patiently signed up on waiting lists to receive their own little affordable sports car, like Raleigh dealer, Sport Durst Mazda.
Miata production couldn’t keep up with sales, because of great reviews by auto magazines, word of mouth and people falling head over heels in over with this fabulous two-seater convertible. It was competing with the Alfa Romeo and Fiat sports cars and doing more than well against them. Some of the many awards the Miata won have been Car of the Year by Wheels Magazine, Car of the Year in Japan, Car and Driver Magazine put the Miata on its Ten Best Car list fourteen times and it has been designated the Most Important Sports Car in the Last 25 Years by Grassroots Magazine.
Once you see this car you will be drawn to it. It’s a perfect car and you have to wonder why nobody came up with the concept before Mazda did in the 1980s. Maybe that was just the perfect time for a perfect car to be produced. Mazda did take a pretty big gamble though. A lot of other sports cars were out there at that time and Mazda knew it would have to compete with them for customers. The great thing that Mazda did was bypass the competition because of the affordability of the Miata. What Mazda did was the same thing that Henry Ford did, only with a sports car: the Miata was built for ‘every man” and every man (and woman), could afford it.
