I have sat in the new Mazda MX-30, the company’s first full production EV, and I still couldn’t tell you how large it is, “freestyle” rear doors and all.
“First of all we wanted a coupe look,” Youichi Matsuda, the car’s designer, told me at the Tokyo Motor Show this year, explaining the body style. There wasn’t much of a second of all, other than that the car was supposed to have “a familiarity. Something you can depend on,” but that its tough shape had “no intention to be rugged.”
The looks of the vehicle say that it’s a big car. It is chunky. But seeing its specs made it seem like a small car. The battery pack is only 35.5 kWh, and its (EU specs) only claim 120-odd miles of range. Horsepower is in the mid 100s, denoting something on the small side.
But even actually sitting in the thing it was hard to gauge if it really even was small at all. The MX-30 is dark inside, so it somehow feels both tighter than, say, the new Honda Fit in another section of the show, but also bulkier than that vehicle as well. The MX-30 just doesn’t have a lot of room. All my reference points felt askew.
Still, it’s wonderfully handsome and I love that we’re getting an EV from Mazda, and a rotary engine range extender for this thing too.
I just can’t help but shake the feeling that more space and a bit of a stretch would break it out of this space/time dilation it’s in.
