Miata Fuels Interest in Niche Sales : Detroit May Fill Void in Domestic Specialty-Car Market

While stylists and engineers at Chrysler, General Motors and Ford were working up concept cars in their corporate design studios, executives at Mazda Motor Corp. listened to an Irvine research center employee and in 1984 gave the go-ahead to produce a lightweight sports car.

The success of that project--development of the Miata two-seat convertible--has given Japan’s No. 4 auto maker a huge boost, and especially in the United States, where Mazda plans to market most of the Miatas it manufactures.

With the Miata--a car that does not represent any significant leaps in automotive design or engineering--Mazda has upstaged its larger U.S. and Japanese rivals. And that has caused grumbling in some corners.

In a recent article in Wards Auto World, a monthly trade journal, designers at General Motors Advanced Concepts Center complained that Mazda stole GM’s thunder. The Detroit auto giant has had a similar car on the drawing boards for several years but killed the project when the Miata was introduced.

Donald Postma, spokesman for the GM Technical Center in Warren, Mich., said the nation’s No. 1 auto maker has been looking at “a number of two-seat designs.” But he denied that any proposed model was killed because of the Miata’s introduction.

“To say that the industry has changed plans to introduce cars just because of the Miata is not correct,” Postma said. “There is no one reason you bring a car out or kill it once it is being produced. These things are done for a lot of reasons.”

Ford--a 25% owner of Mazda--also has been developing a two-seat convertible, built on the Mazda 323 chassis. But the project has been stymied by repeated design and engineering changes.

“And that’s the difference,” said John Dinkle, editor of Road & Track magazine. “GM and others probably have had two-seat roadsters in design, but Mazda built one!”

Postma said that GM and other U.S. auto makers have learned a valuable lesson from foreign competitors who for years have been growing by serving niche markets that domestic firms ignore.

While it used to be true that Detroit auto makers “looked at base volume of 200,000 cars a year” to justify production, he said, “the growth of niche markets is so strong that we can’t ignore them any more. And the industry has developed enough technology that we now can be flexible enough to meet niche markets of 40,000 or 60,000 or 80,000 cars a year.”