Nothing concrete in this article but Mazda seem to be suiggesting that the MX5 does have a future.
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Reading that , an âelectrifiedâ Mx-5, depresses me more than reading my own obituary.
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I wonât be changing mine for a few years anyway as I enjoy the car, but to me the power source isnât the most important thing, itâs more the open top and how the car feels to drive.
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Certainly will be keeping mine for a while, and whilst itâs charm is in the open-top experienceâŚ, Iâd miss the wonderful interaction with itâs 6 speed manual gearboxâŚ
However, if my left leg fails to work properly I might consider full-electric but not a hybridâŚ
Rob
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I wonder if an a few years we will all be wondering just how we put up with those noisy, smelly, IC engined cars for so long as we all zip about in our EVs.
And how we ever managed to stay safe on the M25 when we had to do the steering, braking and acceleration all by ourselves!
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I hope never to find out, going by my experience of âzipping aboutâ in a soulless eevee.
âwhen we had to do the steering, braking and acceleration all by ourselves!â
Yes, when we interacted with our cars.
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âzip aboutâ youâll spend half your time looking for the next charging point and hoping the queue isnât to long.
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An evolution of battery technology to increase the energy density combined with a modest range (and therefore small, light battery to accommodate) could be the point where EV roadsters really become a viable option.
A 200 mile range with the ability to dump another 150 miles in over 30 minutes or so would be perfect for leisure car duties.
Most modern internal combustion engines are dull old lumps these days anyway. Weâve got two TSI engine cars (Polo and Leon) and the motor adds zero to the driving experience. Just like most of these small displacement forced induction engines we have today. Mazda are clinging on to NA engines but how much longer will they be able to do that?
I am so glad I bought one of the later NDs in 2019. I am afraid that I am a complete âPetrol Headâ dinosaur. I intend to keep mine for as long as I can drive or get in and out of it. When I was a child, I used to love steam locomotives (and still do). They were like living, fire breathing dragons with a heartbeat to me. I completely lost interest in railway engines when they became electrified.
If I had to choose between an electric MX5 (NE?) and a normal EV I would go for the MX5, but if it was a choice between the ND and NE it would be the ND any day!
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Its strange how some people assign a âsoulâ to a pile of cogs and pistons. No car has a soul.
Some of that AI enhanced vintage footage, bringing the past to âliftâ, this time New York, 1911, which was at a crossroads. A few cars are on the road, but less than a decade later, horses were all but swept away from the landscape.
The soundtrack is of course suggestive, but you can imagine the sound of a city before cars appeared, would have been te clippity clop of horses. Some say horsesdonât have a soul, but they have more of asould than any car. At least part of the resistance to EVs, is a lifetime of conditioning.
Those early cars sounded rather different to a horse. You couldnât talk to a car like you would a horse. The only vocalisation at a car would probably beof frustration, as it failed to start, failed to go, failed to stop.
Notable from the film; horse â â â â is everywhere, along with pools of potent smelling horse urine. No one pays heed to it, pedestrians make no attempt to avoid the â â â â . 13 years earlier, New York hosted the worldâs first internatonal urban planning conference. Only one thing on the agenda, and that was the question of horses. Rapid industrialisation and expansion of cities lead to a concomitant increase in the horse population. New York depended on 100,000 horses, London had 50,000, and thats not including the horses drawing drays and carts. These horses ate a lot, and crapped a lot. Each hose would generate about 40lbs of manure a day. The Press in both countries provided 50 year projections how dire things would get. In London, there is reference to âstreet mudâ, a euphamism for the mixture of horse manure and discarded food that caked the streets. For a while it was a valuable resource for farmers, from Essex, whoâd come in and collect it for the fields. But the growth of the number of horses lead to a crash in the price, magnified by the use of early tarmac; the tarmac broke and and mixed with the mud, rendering it worthless as afertilizer. So no one collected it. Street sweepers were originally crossing sweepers; usually boys employed to sweep a clear path through the â â â â . In winter, the manure froze, then melted, penetrating your boots. In summer, it became a dust that got everywhere. Oh, and the mud was also considered a source for typhoid fever.
And it wasnât just the excrement. These working horses would live maybe 3 years, and be worked to death. When they died in the street, they werenât just dragged off to the Knackers Yard. Too heavy, so the carcass would be allowed to putrify a bit, making it easier to transport later.
So streets ankle deep in manure, pools of fetid urine, and bloated horse carcasses, splitting by the road. Then came the car which was progress. It had no soul, you could never make friends with a car, but it was progress. Where that progress would take people in 1911 I doubt they could imagine. They might have thought the control of such machines would only be reserved for the most skilled of automoblist, that it would only be the preserve of the rich, but it was progress, the adoption of which might have been accelerated by a global crisis that reset the old order of things.
The Electric Vehicle is progress, and probably the most significant progress since the car first took to the road. It wonât be the end in itself, there will be further progress.
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But arguably by choosing the ND, you are missing out on the alleged visceral enjoyment of the NA. The ND is very much a sanitized vision of the MX5, some might say a pastiche, as Mazda tried to imitate itself. But thousands of people enjoy the ND, as did a few hundred thousand enjoyed the NA/NB.
Mazdaâs choice of engines recently might well lead to its demise.
My ND has soul. I talk to it softly and the car speaks back to me. I sometimes sing âit only takes a minute girl, to fall in love, to fall in loveâ. The car likes that one and asks me quietly to sing it again.
My ND also likes me singing to it, only Tuesdays and Thursday though: âthereâs a car I know, sheâs the one Iâm dreaming of. Look into her eyes, takes me to the clouds above.â
We have a special relationship. The car has soul.
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But isnât the ND about âhorse and riderâ? 
Marketing.
This guy likes cars:
Seems just my type 
This âownerâ takes it to another level
Stop giving me ideas 
I am another one who is planning to keep my ND, I bought her new and have got six years left to pay for her before I retire.
As lovely as the NA/NB models are, an ND is more suited my needs. Much as I would love to, I donât have the facilities or the time to keep an older car on the road. I need a car that I can keep outside all year and that needs minimal maintenance. I have owned cars with shedloads of visceral enjoyment in the past such as my Davrian and find my modified ND is on a par with most of them.
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Yes, but if the objection to an electric vehicle centres around that its less âconnectedâ than a petrol car, then the same could be said of the ND versus the NA. The former has more driver aids, as well as devices to simulate a feeling of connectivity. Arguably the NA does that as well, with its speed-sensitive power steering.
While petrol cars can be said to have âcharacterâ (though a lot of that comes about through our cultural conditioning), Iâm sure electric cars will also have character, albeit of a different sort.
Plus such arguments can be pushed to the back when the prospect of running a car for free might be a reality (VW setting up free charging stations in Tesco car parks, probably the start of many such schemes, someone will work out a way to mooch all the charging they need for free).