Why I’ll always be mad about the Mazda

Christmas in California. The coming-home ritual begins with the thin metal garage door rolling upwards onto rickety ceiling rails. On the other side, you find a burrow crowded with memories and junk: stacks of outmoded cookbooks, ancient backpacking equipment, a couple of neglected longboards and, in the middle of it all, a dusty tarpaulin covering a machine. 

You remove it, revealing a first-generation black 1994 Mazda MX-5, better known in this part of the world as a Miata. It is old. But it starts without fuss or fanfare, always ready to be enjoyed, always waiting to be loved.

The road from your house winds along the Morro Bay Estuary before merging with Highway 1 northbound. This is not the famously twisty stretch of 1, around the sheer cliffs of Big Sur. The central coast is flatter and wider here, with chaparral-scented plains stretching between golden dells. Anybody who passes by you as you bomb down these straights in this MX-5 (tan soft-top down, hidden headlamps popped up) knows you’re not going anywhere; you’re just out for a drive.

You are pushed along by 116 horses made by a 1.6-litre four-cylinder, which is feeble by contemporary standards. But that is beside the point, because the car is tiny. And you feel small in it too, all of you dipping and diving over bumps, playfully leaning into corners.

Every action you take has an immediate reaction. It’s just you and a manual transmission, which actuates like a rifle bolt because the shifter goes directly into the transmission right beneath you. There is no intercession of fancy software, sophisticated sensors or traction control. In a MX-5, the driver sits at the centre point of a perfect balance. 

In an MX-5, the driver sits at the centre of a perfect balance

Since its introduction for the 1989 model year, the formula for Mazda’s two-seat roadster has more or less remained the same: as light and simple as possible. It was the Japanese take on the classic British roadster and an example of taking something brilliant and making it sublime, like John Coltrane covering “My Favourite Things”. That explains how Japan’s scrappiest automaker created the bestselling two-seater sports car in history, the MX-5 having crossed the one-million-sold mark before its 30th anniversary a few years ago.

The genesis of this success could be said to have originated in 1961, on the shoulder of another Southern California roadway. Bob Hall was an eight-year-old who’d already fallen in love with his father’s British automobiles, including an MG and a Triumph. On this particular day, he was in the back seat on the way to an outdoor car show at Vista Del Mar in west LA, when the family’s Austin-Healey sputtered to a halt on Olympic Boulevard. Little Bobby never got to the motor show. 

The episode came back to him in 1979, when a Mazda executive named Kenichi Yamamoto asked him what the upstart company should work on next. By then, Hall had owned a Datsun 510, a car that “wasn’t very fun to drive, but bloody hell was it reliable”, he tells me. “And I’d started thinking, wouldn’t it be great if you had a car that was as much fun to drive as a British sports car but was as reliable as a Japanese vehicle?” Hall got approval to work the idea up in 1982. It took seven years and a team that included legendary manager Toshihiko Hirai, but the end result was the MX-5.

Despite the sales success, the MX-5 only recently earned the cultural cachet it was always due. For years, it was derided as a secretary’s car, a cruiser for hairdressers and a mid-life-crisis mobile – as if secretaries and hairdressers don’t love hauling ass. Though, to be fair, our MX-5 came to us in that third category, not too long before the divorce.

For most of its lifespan, the MX-5 was one of those if-you-know-you-know vehicles – until a few years ago, when younger enthusiasts began realising how much bang for their buck a used MX-5 offered compared to something cooler. Over the past decade, as its cult took off further on TikTok, the MX-5 became a key example of a “youngtimer” car, aka vehicles that have pull with car people but are still too young for classic-car status. 

This year, I checked out a pal’s current-gen MX-5. The new car is a vehicle with all the technology and safety equipment you’d expect in 2025. It has shed the baby fat, with sharper lines and headlamps tucked into aggressive slits. It has 66 more horsepower than the original and revs out at 7,500rpm, which is where you’ll feel the extra horsepower. But the magic is the same, because Mazda applied “gram strategy” to keep the car as light as possible, using aluminium and magnesium instead of steel where it could. As a result, it’s only about 75kg heavier than one from 30 years ago.

I ask Hall about the future of the MX-5, specifically what he thinks about the prospect of electrification. He clarifies that he hasn’t worked for the company in years, but then adds: “What you do with the Miata is what you do the first time around: less is more. I don’t see why you can’t do the same thing with an EV.” (Mazda’s entire line-up is slated to go at least partially electric by 2030, but the company hasn’t announced any specific plans about the MX-5.)

Before you turn around you pull into San Simeon State Park, home to the most beautiful beach in California. You catch a glimpse of William Randolph Hearst’s Castle, with its stately pleasure dome, looking down from a bald spot in the coastal mountains. Now there was a guy who didn’t get the whole simplicity and lightness thing, you think, climbing back into the driver’s seat. But you don’t sweat it, or anything else, as you rip down Highway 1 towards home.