This year marks the 40th birthday of one of the greatest sports cars ever made: the wedge-shaped, rotary powered Mazda RX-7. So let’s celebrate a car that gave this world all the spinning triangle weirdness it deserved.
Just over a week ago, Mazda Japan announced its 2019 Mazda Miata—the light, little car everyone either loves (or hates because everyone else loves it)—will go up to 181 horsepower and a 7,500-RPM redline. It was a huge jump from the current car’s power, but nothing was confirmed for other markets. Until now.
During the entire last half of 2017, more than a dozen U.S. states were making a fuss to become the site of a $1.6-billion production plant for Toyota and Mazda. Now that the companies have picked Alabama, the fuss has changed—the plant could put a rare fish species at risk of extinction, according to a recent lawsuit.
Likely in attempts to tell the entire world to shut it about the Miata needing more horsepower, Mazda is finally giving in. The updated Mazda Miata will have 181 horsepower, a 7,500-RPM redline and a telescopic steering wheel—at least, that’ll be the case in Japan.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into a corrosion issue at Mazda following over 20 reports from owners who say rust in their 2009-2010 Mazda 6s has caused, or nearly caused, a steering failure.
This is a Craigslist post from Rhode Island selling a 1993 Mazda Protege. That shouldn’t be a big deal. But this Protege, while it appears to be in quite good shape, is missing something. Specifically, it’s missing well over a foot and a half of Mazda Protege. And, what makes it even more incredible is that this fact…
There’s a Plymouth Colt that lives in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The name alone should tell you how old it is, and what it is—a miserable shitbox of a car from the 1980s. I don’t know how long it’s been living there, since at least 2003, I’m told, but one thing is for sure: it’s a survivor.
Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know.
The 2018 Mazda 6 is prettier than ever, and its top-trim interior is downright elegant. It also finally has the thing we’ve been craving from this sporty midsize sedan for years now—more power. But despite improvements to the suspension and an extra 60-plus horses from a new turbocharger, this 6 feels like a move…
By now, we know that there are more accurate ways to pronounce the names of Japanese automakers than the ones that we dumb Americans have been using. Mazda, for instance, is pronounced “Matsuda” in Japan. But did you know that there are also very fascinating historical and cultural reasons behind some of these names?
The turbocharged 2018 Mazda 6 will likely be one of the best-value sporty sedans you can buy new. On Tuesday, we’ll be spending some time with the 250 horsepower four-door and the people who built it. So what do you want to know?
Automakers are obsessed with turbocharging everything at the moment, being that consumers are demanding ever more power and low-end torque feel from their cars, while attempting to meet fuel economy expectations at the same time. That low-end boost is provided a number of ways, but effectively manufacturers desire the…
Underneath a quiet office building in even-quieter Irvine, California, there rests some of the loudest, strangest, most glorious race cars and historic cars ever made. This is Mazda’s hidden basement in Southern California, something few people even inside the company ever see. What’s funny is it didn’t start out as…
In 1991, little Mazda stood at the top of the world. It won the 24 Hours of Le Mans with its banshee Mazda 787B prototype, and here is the 700-horsepower quad-rotor engine that got it the win.
Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know.
It’s hard to put the success of the Mazda Miata into perspective, a unbelievably huge hit from a rather small company. How small? Small enough that Mazda didn’t have enough money to to put out the Miata and a minivan at the same time, and it chose the minivan first.
I got quite a bit of my love of cars from my father, but the people his age that I knew never seemed to understand why I loved Toyota Supras, Mazda rotary engines and various examples of how Nissan used to give a damn. But the people who did grow up appreciating these kinds of cars are now after them in a big way, and…
With rotary engines long out of production, the job of building and maintaining them has fallen to individual experts, like wizards of some kind of dark art. But there was a time when things were official, and this is what that factory assembly process looked like.
I love aircooled Volkswagens. I should—in theory—hate Paul Nelson’s car, but I can’t. It’s a Mazda Miata under a Type 3 body, and I ain’t even mad.