Did you wake up feeling different this morning? Like your alarm buzzer’d been replaced by a chorus of singing angels? That wasn’t in your head, it was coming from Japan, where Mazda has announced its going to start officially restoring first-gen Miatas.
As announced on a Japanese Mazda blog this morning and confirmed by company spokesman Jacob Brown on Facebook, Mazda will begin taking orders for NA Miata restoration projects this year and start putting the cars together in 2018.
Mazda has set up a website dedicated to its new old-car revival efforts which, obvioulsy, I recommend you feast your eyes on. As the company explains:
“Manufacturer Mazda will meet directly with customers and will carry out services tailored to the status and needs of individual cars. Working at Mazda’s facility, we plan to acquire classic car garage certification from TÜV Rheinland Japan Co., Ltd. We will be able to deliver restored cars to our customers with high quality.” (Translated from Japanese)
Mazda states that 120,000 first-gen Miatas were sold in Japan over the course of the car’s run, and estimates that 23,000 are left “and loved like customers like their families.” I mean, yeah. We get it.
To help bring some luster back to those remaining cars, Mazda’s reprinting the incredible and perfect three-spoke Nardi wood steering wheel and matching shift knob. That, sans-airbag, was apparently factory optional equipment in Japan and some other countries that didn’t mandate airbags as aggressively as the United States.
The original soft top and tires are also being reproduced by the Mazda factory.
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As to whether these parts or Mazda’s factory restoration service will be offered outside Japan, it appears that the answer is “not yet” but we’ve reached out to Mazda to find out more details.
But I’m pretty thrilled that Mazda has decided to recognize the awesomeness of an objectively archaic product. Now I’m curious to see who among us is enough of a Miata nut that they’ll actually pony up for a time machine back to the car’s glory days of the early 1990s?
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