Mazda Miata Documentaries ND | EP5 Final Chapter?

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so when we were starting development of the the nd the new program manager for this car Yamamoto son he really had this vision of going back to the original concept of being a really pure lightweight sports car and that was sort of music to our ears in the u.s. that's what we'd been trying to push the car toward the whole time and so we were we can't take credit for pushing the car there but because his his vision was if anything more pure than ours was in terms of getting the car small and light and simple so he wanted it so simple that it was going to have you know a tiny little 1.5 liter engine globally as well which was sort of the one place where we differentiated from him but one of the the biggest sort of departures was as we were trying to get the car to drive dynamically as much I can in a Miata as we could visually we wanted to look totally different and and that came from sort of revisiting who that the customers were for the car and what how well the car was perceived in the world outside of our customers so as as Miata enthusiasts we see the Miata as as a pure sports car and when we look at at the NA we see sort of a pure distillation of a 60s roadster what a lot of the general public sees in today is a cute eagle beach cruiser I sort of delineated em a and B and see differentiation between first two ii ii ii ii the third fourth well fortunately unfortunately i never had to do it I left Mazda by then I got a phone call from them say we're gonna start the fourth generation I said whoo I did the first three but not necessary fourth but I say look 100 yards away has to be me and you know recognized as a Miata years away and I think the final came it's exactly that you recognize it right away right as Indy but still within overall Miata sort of family look and we really wanted to sort of break that and how people stop making fun of this little Secretary's car and have them have everybody recognize it as a sports car and getting the design sort of direction to change to a more aggressive path took introducing the Japanese team to the way the cars perceived here in the US because in Japan everyone recognizes it for the sports car that it is and and they didn't realize that it kind of gets people looked down my nose is that the car in some circles here so we had to get him together with a bunch of of Miata clubs and we're they were talking want to understand everything about those owners experiences but at one point we asked them you know has anybody ever made fun of your car and every single person was like oh yeah people make fun of my car all the time they think it's cutesy little nothing and that was a groundbreaking thing for the Japanese because they just didn't have that experience over there I think for the mxi what's unique about it it's a very simple easy to understand concept and in any product or in anything you do simple is usually the best way to go and it's a very clear focus for what the vehicle is and that carried through from the first gen to the second gen and the third gen and now even in the fourth gen and obviously it's been successful we've sold over a million of them over the you know the 30 years the car has been in production and we'll continue to follow that same philosophy of keeping it very simple and very pure and very easy to understand one of the things that I thought about was the Motorsports part of it that kind of popped up out of nowhere it which seemed to surprise everybody Spec Miata and the cop car collaboration right with long road now that you're into the NC and the nd which are now being raised and the most raced grassroots Motorsports vehicles in the world right when you started to develop the nd how much was the Motorsports part of that car was it really baked into the overall design at this point or was it car first Motorsports secondary the the idea for a global mx-5 Cup was hatched early on yamamoto was talking about this years before we had a prototype so it was it was part of the idea from the beginning the design for the oiling for the engine for example is designed to maintain oil pressure at one point for GE sustained street cars never doing that so there's there's stuff like that that's that sort of baked in from the beginning anticipating that there's going to be a race car it kind of gets fuzzy where you where do you assume that all right the race cars can have different parts here we don't to worry about that but we do have to worry about it here so you know there's lots of times there's difficult cost decisions where we can't necessarily you know put giant brakes or huge wheel bearings in the car but something like you know setting a standard where the the thing has to maintain oil pressure that is G that doesn't cost us a whole lot but most if you're not looking forward you're not going to realize that you need to do that so that I know that that vision was in there from the beginning [Music] [Music] so the best thing to talk about is to talk about how it drives when you start to push it and that's where this car gets to be its true self yes you can kind of throw it around on the street and be comfortable in it and it gets great fuel efficiency you know you can you could push the high 30 mile per gallon range if you're just puttering this around but when you start to drive it hard you notice that people are like well you know it needs more horsepower and I've been one of those people that said this with the revision to the nd2 motor and now we finally have some revs so we have the power that kind of didn't come out when that 2-liter first launched with the nd one this new motor you feel a sense of acceleration it doesn't lug up a hill it doesn't feel like you're not going anywhere it builds speed and you can use all of this and I think that's my favorite part is you can use all the horsepower and you can still appreciate driving this fast without going in insane speeds where you're gonna lose your license people talk about a lot and I I've said this too is it feels soft the suspension has a lot more float to it but then you start to get it when you drive it on roads like this especially in California where there's a lot of you know bumps and dips and changes and camber where the suspension lifts up and down and if you were in a really stiff car on bad pavement it would unsettle it you would get bump steer you would have more twitchiness in the rear-end and because there's so much motion and the suspension here you don't get any of that now I've talked to other owners as well that have had all the generations and there's truth to the fact that this is not as whimsical feeling as the NA and the NB it feels a lot more serious it feels more purpose-built for driving and I for one can appreciate just how special that is because all the true drivers cars are starting to disappear you're getting in the market you're getting the weight you're getting these more touring GT cars and you're getting high horsepower which is a lot of fun but you can't again I talk about this all the time you can't utilize all of that in a safe manner on most every public road but in two three seconds most of the time you're you're maxed out the speed limit and you know it becomes kind of a safety risk and a kill it just it kills your ability to have fun we're this I mean if you have roads like this of course you can utilize almost all the power that's available to you here and then some everything about this feels like it's been tweaked and massaged and totally refined everything about it gives you this sense of adrenaline rush and fun you feel so connected to this car and every single measure that you can't and most at most of anything under $70,000 these days now cars are getting better and it's true the Miata has kind of lost out to some of the horsepower Wars but there's a reason why this car has been around for 30 years and there's nothing else that's been able to compete with it and there's nothing else like it in an affordable price range [Music] all right Dave Coleman again Here I am underneath the in D the indeed me out it was one of the first ones I actually got to be involved with sort of from the beginning from the concept stage this car was really a kind of a return to the purity of the original car the car we benchmarked the most in developing this car was the in a Miata we really wanted to get back to the simplicity and light weight of that car the the program manager young motifs on was really really adamant about this being as light as possible and this car also kind of benefited in the same way as the NA from some delays both this car and the NA were delayed a year or two from their original launch timing and that gave more time to sort of dial things in and sort things out and really refine the car and shape more grams out of it then than would have been possible otherwise so the big recession kind of delayed a lot of programs and should have stretched the ANC's life cycle a little bit a little bit longer so we got a lot more time to really sort of talk things through on this car so we really shrunk discard down on every measurable dimension on the outside but kept the interior space and sort of dimensionally the same but made this shape smarter so that humans fit in it better I fit in an Indy a lot better than I fit in NC and I'm sort of right at the edge of who fits in one of these cars what you can see underneath the car obviously is a lot of aluminum a lot of the structural ideas are the same remember this butterfly brace that was on the NC it's a whole lot lighter now dozen lumen 'm there was a structural panel underneath the middle of the subframe here on the NC that was steel it's aluminum now but thick enough aluminum to really act as a sheer panel the control arms are even lighter even more forged aluminum than they were before but they've got aluminum uprights now weird details that I didn't realize mattered as much as I do at first the orientation of this this bushing on the back of the control arm you'll notice on the end see the bolt goes through vertically and it just sort of twists a rubber bushing this way now it's this way we're rotating the bushing around it doesn't seem like it should matter on a double wishbone car that does matter a lot and the reason is not immediately obvious when you push up on the wheel the the spring and shock are holding down in somewhere in the middle of the control arm so there's a reaction force down at the bushing and when the the bushing is it's this way it has a lot more axial travel and so when you hit a bump it's kind of this undamped shaking here and it actually puts some limitations on how you can tune the suspension when you're trying to prevent this this shake whereas the bushing is a lot stiffer in this orientation on a strut car where the the spring and shock are right on the knuckle it doesn't matter you can orient the bushing either way but on a wishbone car this was a really big deal to get this oriented the right way so that's something I learned from the from the smart guys in Japan so back here under the middle of the car there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here this sort of corner here where the footwell meets the engine bay was a really sort of important area that sort of refined things and get anything squeezed in we're trying to pull the engine back as far as we can so it came back even farther and lower than it was in the NC but at the same time we're trying to protect the driver space and in fact we're sort of reprioritizing things in getting the driver's seating position really symmetrical so the driving position is such that your left and right foot are equally spaced around the center line of your body and you're not offset of any for the transmission tunnel in the u.s. that wasn't super noticeable in the earlier cars in Japan it was very noticeable for some reason you notice being offset in that direction I think because you have to have a dead pedal and in the clutch pedal and so your driving position when you're actually using the clutch is farther offset whereas on the in the US with our gas pedal up against the tunnel it wasn't quite as obvious that our driving position was offset but with this generation of cars would really refocus on getting the driving position perfectly symmetrical and ideal and that meant getting this corner kind of pushed down so we can get the pedals where they need to be which is really fighting for space with the exhaust and the catalytic converter and the subframe mounts and the engine mounts and the suspension and so you can see if you look closely the exhaust it's really tightly packaged and there's a couple of really sort of aggressive bends in it to get it to all fit in here at the same time this original design was designed around a 1.5 liter and having enough room for a 1.5 liters exhaust and the smaller engine up there and we had sort of rammed the 2 litre into it relatively late in development so is a real packaging challenge to get this corner of the car to work out but the driving position really sort of pays off so that was I think one of the benefits of delaying the program and also know there's a new transmission in here this in in the era where everything is automatic transmission dual clutch everything nobody will ever develop a new manual transmission again we took a perfectly good 6-speed manual transmission threw it out and designed another 6-speed manual transmission in chasing pounds out of this car designing a completely new transmission let us do two things took 15 pounds out of the transmission for one which is not an insignificant amount of weight but also really rethought the way the gear ratios are laid out and structured so that one we lay out a much simpler shifter so we don't have this little sort of rocker arm and one of the shift throws that they made this shift action a little bit heavier so it has a lighter more direct shift feel but also your typical rear-wheel drive transmission will have a one to one fourth gear it's sometimes a fifth gear and this goes back to the fact that a lot of five-speed manuals and even 6-speed manual two are designed around designs that were originally for speeds and back then you put it in fourth gear that was your that was your cruisin gear and a direct one-to-one gear is the most efficient one you don't put loads of any gears so there's a lot less driveline drag with a six-speed transmission of course you're cruising gear is six here yours passing through fourth on the way so the one that's going to have an impact on the cars efficiency and fuel economy is six here so weary geared the whole thing so sixth gear is one to one and then to make the ratios work out you have to have a wildly different gear ratio in the back then we're used to so you're used to something around three point nine four four point one as a final drive back at the back of the cart you could be forgiven for thinking that we carried over the rear suspension from the NC cuz it's got five links that you can't figure out by looking at them again but actually the geometry is very different and sort of came at things from a different different angle I mentioned before that we had two different kinds of passive steering in the back of one of these suspensions there's the compliance steer from the bushings deflecting and there's the kinematic steer from the body roll and the nce had a trick that was carried over from the rx-8 where the compliance steer would tow it out and the the roll steer would tow it back in the idea being that as you turn in the first thing that happens is you get a slide that on the tire so that steering happens first and that in the long wheelbase rx-8 would help kind of rotate the back of the car into the corner and then as the body rolled it would tow back in Andry stabilize it so it'd give you a nimble turn in and a more stable exit that also kind of weirded some people out they turn in and they have that little bit of instability and they make them nervous so we kind of flipped the script on that and put both of those steering to toe in so as you turn in it would stabilize a little bit and as it rolled would stabilize a little bit more and that kind of works better with sort of the feedback loop between the car and the driver where you you're making an input expecting some result getting the results you expect and and sort of following through with it so as we sort of focused more and more on on the driver rather than the mechanics of what the car was doing we started coming to different solutions that that made the car more natural and easier to drive fast a couple other things you'll notice back here is the the way that the subframe is designed if you look all the way back to an na and NB the diff bolted into the bottom of the subframe and there were some structure that hang would hang down and the arms attached to that and those structures could sort of Bend when you put a cornering load on them so later years they started putting braces across those underneath the diff if you look at the way the subframe is designed on the Indy now the main structure of the subframe he's in line with the main lateral links so the cornering load comes straight in through here and is braced directly with this so the from the viewpoint of where the cornering loads are coming into the subframe it's much much more rigid so it's much more sort of weight efficient putting the putting the structure where it needs to be for the cornering loads so I talked about how we saved a bunch of weight off the transmission at that end that this end the diff actually I think we saved about another 15 pounds off the diff as well and that's about all I can remember about the back of this car here so let's go up to an engine bay and talk about what's up there alright so here we are under the hood of the Indy if you remember the Tupperware spaghetti mess that was under the NC this is looks a lot more like a traditional engine bay and this was will put a lot of work into making sure this really looked like something sort of classic where you could tell the engine from all the other hoses and stuff not a lot of engine Bay's actually look like engines anymore those have covers on them this is a real departure because you know every little bit of this car was designed to save weight this costs more and weighs more than a plastic valve cover but it's aluminum because that's just the right thing to do in a sports car and we finally decided to do it one thing you'll see is there was a big difference in the engines output from the Indy ones of the Indy - we did a recent update to the engine and dramatically increase the power a lot of that comes from the fact that this wasn't planned in the car in the first place so all the development money was allocated to the 1.5 liter that was based on the 1.5 that was in a Mazda 2 and then they put forged crank and rods into it different cams and different manifolds and big reports and made it revved higher make more power once we finally kind of collected it some more engineering budget to go in and do what we did with the 1.5 - this that's where we got the big power bomb now the the funny thing is that all of the internal documents around the development of this engine would never mention the fact that was gonna make more power the whole purpose of this engine was to make it rev higher and be smoother and have that feel of being able to just wring out the motor it take it to 7,500 rpm and really enjoy the top end of the rev range that's where the enjoyment is for this car we didn't actually know how much more power the thing had until we were getting marketing documents when the cars were on boats like it was not a thing all of the effort behind this car is making it feel right and and you know the sort of American obsession with horsepower we translate that into oh my god I got 25 horsepower but really what happened is I got 15 of your ribs on the top of the power band that's that's what mattered to us and you see that we finally did lose the power steering pump that used to be over there on the NC we finally relented and went back to electric power steering this time whereas the rx-8 had this electric motor wrapped around the steering rack that would only work if you had a super short rotary engine this has a dual pinion rack where your steering pinion over here coming from your steering shaft and there's another opinion on the other side of the rack with a motor on it so as you turn the wheel the motor turns to to assist you and the reason we put the assist down there where every other car that we make has the assist up on the steering column is because the amount of torque going through the steering shaft is a lot less and so the shaft itself doesn't deflect you have a more direct steering response when you have a low torque steering shaft and all the assist is right on the rack so I think the end result of this sort of obsession with the way the engine feels in the way it revs has really given us one of the the best feeling naturally aspirated motors that it's out there now most modern engines are so focused on low-end torque it was just you know fine for really good for your daily drivability as a sports car you want to build a rev it out and really sort of enjoy that part of the power band and so a lot of ways this engine kind of feels like a throwback to sort of the the great 90s of high rev engine but with the the refinement and efficiency that we have with with modern direct injection and all that [Music] you've reached the conclusion of this video series I've driven every generation Miata I've had a chance to talk to some of the key people in the United States that helped kickstart this car design it from its inception to tell their story the cars story and some of the Japanese perspective and certain people ask well what about this sub model what about the Mazda speed Miata what's the story with that and I can't cover every single thing but what I will say is a huge thanks to Mazda North American for allowing me to do this to have access to these vehicles to try to talk talk about and tell the story and a huge thanks to the patreon that make this possible because a video series like this it's really not about the views this is not going to be some popular mind-blowing thing it's going to have a limited scope and it's costly and time consuming compared to just you know quantity type material so if you want to see more get on the patreon side I'm going to release more extended interviews and all of that for you but the biggest takeaway from this one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to do a video like this or videos like this some people have a better understanding of how why cars like this exist and are they viable for the future and I have to say from the Mazda perspective I'm shocked at this car that the nd Miata was even created because this is one of the very few if not one of the last because cars like this are becoming extinct that were designed for enthusiasts that are on a dedicated architecture platform that's not shared out with an SUV CUV another car it's its own vehicle and that is so expensive and so time-consuming to make for that hand few of people that actually buy them I don't know the only way to fund projects like this is to sell a kajillion other cars and a smaller company like Mazda doesn't do that compared to other ones so I really hope that this car exists in another 30 years or 60 years and my great grandkids can be talking about it like I'm talking about today but if not try to get in one of these I don't care what generation and really appreciate how special it is and how few vehicles like it exists and then the last part to talk about is what is the best Miata people ask me this all the time well you drove them all and I'm gonna say this it depends on what generation you come from in your driving experience I've talked to the older people I've talked to younger people and the older crowd that grew up or was alive during the time when the na and NB were released and being designed they have an affinity towards that car that was the first me out of the real Miata and subsequent the end see the nd it's not the same and then you get into the younger crowd maybe first Carly drove as an NC or an nd for me my very first Miata experience was in a Mazda speed Miata and I'd already been tainted by an s2000 so it's kind of like I don't really see it but getting into the nd in the NC objectively they are far better performance cars but the NA and the NB have this purity to them because they were trying to emulate that of the old British sports car this whimsical simple open feeling that you don't get from newer cars and it's kind of split it's up to who you are to decide which Miatas for you I'll take an nd to me out on any day I think it's amazing for what it is and how its evolved from the start and kind of gone back is just something I have yet to driven in any type of affordable price it's a special car if you get your hands on one and if you can afford it check it out but thank you so much for watching this series I'll catch you next time you you

Channel: savagegeese

Views: 354,349

Keywords: cars, trucks, carvana, cargurus, shopping, reviews, mazda, miata, 2020, 2019, ND, Mazdaspeed, best used car, porsche, honda, Civic, TypeR, GolfR, VW, documentary, how its made, diy, toyota, supra, bmw, m3, Z4, ford mustang, Corvette, C8, C7, best car, best convertible, history, subaru wrx, 2021, sti, S209, fun cars, affordable, reliable used cars, na miata, nb miata, NC, nd2

Id: 38SE1-1hBlI

Length: 28min 41sec (1721 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020