Mazda Nagare

Start with what the Mazda Nagare is: a 2-door coupe with Rumored hydrogen-fueled rotary engine, built from 2006, in the decade of stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Laurens van den Acker.

How it came about

The Mazda Nagare (マツダ・流, Matsuda Nagare) (pronounced "nah-gah-reh") was a concept car that was introduced by Mazda at the 2006 Los Angeles Auto Show. The Nagare was considered to be an exercise in natural and organic car design to explore the future of Mazda automobiles. Its name "Nagare" translates into English as "flow" and the designers specifically studied motion and the effect it has on natural surroundings when creating this vehicle. It was designed by Laurens van den Acker, Mazda's global design director at the time (since replaced by Ikuo Maeda), and his advanced design studio team in Irvine, California. As head of the international Nagare design team, Laurens' main task from Mazda was to design first and engineering later.

"The Nagare is a celebration of proportions and surface language that will evolve into subsequent designs planned for presentation at future international auto shows. Nagare examines light and shadow, and begins to reveal the global design cues for the next generation of Mazda vehicles," said Laurens. "We're looking well down the road with Nagare. We want to suggest where Mazda design will be in 2020. To do that, we redefined basic proportions and the idea of driving without losing the emotional involvement. Mazda's driving spirit will be enhanced and intensified by Nagare."

The hardware

The engine is Rumored hydrogen-fueled rotary engine. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.

Family and rivals

In the Mazda line-up the Mazda Nagare has a clear place: it handed the line to the Mazda Furai. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Audi R8, the Nissan Qashqai, the Audi Q7. Its Mazda stablemates include the Mazda BT-50 and the Mazda T2000.