Romancing The Roadster

By S.C. Gwynne/Detroit

Once in a great while, an automaker creates a car that sends rivals into a + funk and motorists into a covetous swoon. Right now that vehicle is Mazda's new MX-5 Miata, a curvaceous, two-seat convertible that is intended to combine the look and feel of mid-century roadsters with the reliability of modern engineering. The first few thousand Miatas began arriving at Mazda dealerships earlier this month, and sold out instantly.

Thanks to unusually passionate praise from car-buff magazines, the Miata is by far the most talked-about new auto on the market. Road & Track named it one of the five best cars in the world, along with the Ferrari Testarossa, the Porsche 911 Carrera, the Corvette ZR-1 and the Mercedes-Benz 300E, chichi chariots all. Not the least of the Miata's attributes is its base price: just $13,800, or about $600 less than the average new-car price that U.S. consumers are currently paying. At the moment, however, the Miata is so popular that some dealers are tacking on a premium of as much as $4,000 to the base price.

The idea for the car came out of Mazda's research-and-design center in California, where planners foresaw demand for a car reminiscent of the European roadsters of the 1950s and '60s. Miata's original designer, Mark Jordan, whose father is head of design at GM, drew his inspiration from such legendary nameplates as M.G., Austin-Healy and Lotus.

The Miata is a rolling rebuke to Detroit, which has continued to lose ground to Japanese automakers amid slumping car sales. Mazda spent only about $100 million to develop the Miata, a fraction of what U.S. manufacturers typically spend to bring out a new model. For one thing, the Miata is devoid of digital display panels, electronic suspension and other costly gewgaws favored by Detroit's Big Three. Instead, Mazda lavished attention on Miata's engine, a 1.6-liter, four-cylinder model that uses more valves per cylinder (four instead of two) to provide greater zip. Mazda also focused on such fine points as the simplicity of the convertible top's operation, the feel of the gas pedal and shifter, and the sound of the car's exhaust. A Mazda engineer recorded some 200 exhaust "notes" before deciding on the right pitch for the Miata.

Mazda, which is building the Miata in a plant in Hiroshima, plans to sell about 20,000 of the cars in the U.S. during 1989 and 40,000 next year. That is only a small portion of the 10 million-car U.S. market, but the Miata represents another little dent in Detroit's battered pride.