Mazda MX-5
Mazda
Mazda
This is the catalogue record of the Mazda MX-5, one of 180 models Mazda has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1989. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Mazda MX-5 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Lexus Lexus LS, the Subaru Subaru Legacy, the Honda Honda NSX — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
The open record carries no verified specification sheet for the Mazda MX-5 yet — no engine entry, no quoted output, no kerb weight. That is not unusual: of the seventeen-thousand-plus cars in this library, thousands are concepts, racers and regional models whose numbers were never formally published. MotorJury's nightly harvest re-reads Wikidata and the Wikipedia infoboxes on every build, so the moment a specification is added to the public record it appears here without anyone touching this page.
Within Mazda's own catalogue the Mazda MX-5 sits alongside the Mazda BT-50, the Mazda T2000, the Efini MS-8, the Mazda 121. Assembly is recorded at Japan: Hiroshima (Ujina Plant No. 1).
For the years the United States federal record covers, EPA-rated economy comes in at 30 mpg combined, which works out near $3,300 a year in fuel at current prices.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
The catalogue records what the Mazda MX-5 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.