Exploring Mazda’s amazing history and future at its Hiroshima museum – car pictures of the week
In the latest issue of evo, we look back at Mazda’s fascinating history by visiting its Hiroshima museum – these are our favourite shots
Is Mazda one of the most enigmatic semi-mainstream car companies there is? It’s not like Morgan, Pagani or Koenigsegg. It makes Golf-rivalling hatchbacks after all. But then, it’s not allegorical of Volkswagen either – it produces one of the world’s best-loved sports cars and has over decades, championed one of the strangest possible engine layouts, the rotary. It’s raced at and won Le Mans, it’s won in Touring car championships, it’s gone rallying. In some ways, it’s like a less premium Japanese Porsche, only weirder.
It also almost always goes against the grain – remember when it responded to the downsizing trend by… upsizing? Something central to Mazda that we very much get on with at evo, is that it always wants its cars to be satisfying to drive and thoughtfully engineers them to that end, again often with outside-the-box thinking being employed.
Antony Ingram knows more than most about Mazda and took a trip to its museum at its Hiroshima base to explore its history. His feature in issue 344 of evo, available in-store or from the evo shop, is a deep dive into this amazing marque. We’ve selected a few shots of some landmark models on display. You can also read an excerpt from the feature below.
- Mazda RX-7 FD (1992 - 2002): a '90s Japanese icon
- Mazda MX-5 review – the last surviving affordable sports car
- Mazda 787B: the anatomy of a rotary Le Mans icon
‘Mazda has always been a bit of an automotive nonconformist. Throughout its history it has pursued design and engineering solutions that other automakers have neither the will nor ability to execute – or are perhaps too risk-averse to investigate further. It’s even out on a limb geographically; while most of Japan’s automakers are clustered between Tokyo and Nagoya, Mazda sits more than 250 miles further west in its original home of Hiroshima.
In the global automotive ocean, Mazda is a pretty small fish, selling fewer cars each year than Tesla and roughly a ninth as many as Toyota. That it has cultivated a reputation among car enthusiasts out of proportion to its sales figures is a testament to the company’s habit of doing things just a little differently, and if you’re yet to be convinced by Mazda’s methods, the museum in Hiroshima is a pretty good place to start.’ – Antony Ingram, evo contributor.
