A Car Designer Fixes The Mazda Miata’s One Big Flaw

I’m not a fussy person, but I can be picky.

The crucial difference is a fussy person demands that everything be tailored to their exact requirements at all times. I saw something on Twitter this morning about how Millennials and Zoomers leave their phones on Do Not Disturb because how dare someone demand any of their precious attention. Elvis on a Honda Monkey bike, is this how far we’ve cratered as a civilization? Be a real adult like me and leave it on silent, because misanthropy is a sacred code to live by, not this week’s lifestyle choice. Conversely, being picky means I’m choosy about how I dress, what I wear, what books I read and what media I consume; whether this is the result of a lifetime spent cultivating specific interests and aesthetics or because I’m an autistic square peg in the round hole of human existence is a matter for the courts to decide.

Car designers spend an inordinate amount of time being picky about the largest and smallest details. Almost everything the customer can see, touch or interact with is the purview of a designer inside the studio. Whether it’s the look of a plastic engine cover, the fit of a door seal or the placement of a warning label in a grey zone, at some point a designer will have sweated these innocuous details. If an OEM doesn’t put any care or attention into small visible things you can see, one can only imagine how they treat the things you can’t see … which makes the cope over panel gaps by Tesla’s most-online fans hilarious. Real paying customers care very much about small things indeed. As Charles Eames said, “details are not details; they make the design.” If I see a student’s render and they’ve ballsed up the perspective or proportions, my mind immediately rejects it no matter how otherwise good their design is because it tells me they haven’t developed an eye for the basics yet.

I’m not deliberately boarding the awkward train to Nitpick City. Freud called this phenomenon “the narcissism of small differences.” The idea is that if something is slightly off with what we desire, that’s a bigger issue than it being totally wrong. When the amount of wrongness condenses into a core of galaxy-sized shittitude, it’s easy to give an existential shrug of the shoulders and move on. But one tiny little error in something otherwise acceptable will manifest overwrought anguish, cardiovascular palpitations, and sleepless nights. Thankfully, I was created in a top-secret NHS research laboratory in the seventies and don’t sleep or have a heart, so instead I’ve come up with a new series where I fix these small car design errors. We’re calling it …

Altered By Adrian

The idea is I’m going to choose a car and remedy something about it that bugs the absolute caps off my markers. To tweak something that I think could have been done better. Yep, Mr. Big Shot Smart Mouth Car Designer is going to do some actual design work for change. These aren’t going to be ground-up designs like I used to do early on in my Autopian career, because those were time consuming and I have a lot of day drinking to do. Instead, I’m going to be making minor changes that will have a big effect. This will be a great way to demonstrate that car design is an act of nuance, as well as imparting some small but easily digestible car design lessons along the way.

Our Subject: The Mazda MX-5 Miata

One of my big caveats when doing design breakdowns and commentary is that to really understand a car, you need to see it in the metal. Photographs flatten the sculpture and obscure the subtlety, and in the case of press pack images they’re usually manipulated to make sure the new model looks as good as possible. So imagine my shock and horror when I first clapped eyes on an ND Miata and noticed the unnecessary crease in the body side. What the actual hell is that doing there?

Let’s look at the evidence. I’ve downloaded some Miata press images and uploaded them into the Autopian mainframe (actually a Babbage difference engine made by Torch from Chinese knock-off Erector sets as part of his rehab) for processing. As you can see, there’s a crease that runs from the rear edge of the cockpit, forwards down the rear fender and onto the door. It starts at the corner of the passenger compartment opening, continues forwards under the door handle and fades out having done its evil work somewhere about halfway down the door skin. It does nothing except torture the metal in directions it doesn’t really want to go in, which you can see by the way the highlight across the rear fender in front of the wheel suddenly changes direction. Why is this here?

Surfacing 101

To start understanding how surfacing works, check out the image below. Think of a car like a simple metal box. Each side of the car, i.e. bodyside, hood, trunk, front and rear fascias are like the faces of a cube. The edges of the cube are the intersections between these different panels. How these intersect, and how one surface turns into another, are known as transitions. On the Miata, the main transition between the hood, the trunk, and the body sides are sharply defined. This gives it a strong profile that defines the side view of the car.

Designers use feature lines in a variety of ways, and as a designer it’s important to ask oneself “what is this feature line giving me?” They can and are used as a purely sculptural element, to provide a visual flourish and a bit of interest. They can also be used to define an edge in the bodywork and allow a change in direction of the sheet metal if needed – think sharp box arches, light catchers just above rocker panels, and so on. They can also be used to provide visual continuity with shut lines –  consider how a clamshell hood creates a line that then runs down the length of the car. But no matter why a designer chooses to deploy a feature line, that line needs a start point and an end point. If you look at the small feature line that wraps around the side repeater of the Miata, you see there’s plenty of real estate in the middle of the fender for ends of that small line to blend out without it impacting the shut line of the door or the flat surface of the front wheel arch.

With more prominent feature lines this isn’t always possible, and because the offending line on the Miata ends near the transition between the trunk lid and rear fender, there are in effect three edges coming together which creates an unnecessary corner. I genuinely do not understand why this line is here.

The only reason I can think of is that one of the designers is still mourning the death of the old Nagare design language, as seen above. This was Mazda’s attempt to visualize the word flow (Nagare is flow in Japanese) by introducing wave-like lines into the surfacing. The vast slab sides of a minivan are the type of vehicle you want to break up a bit, but on the Mazda 5 (below) they just looked idiotic and completely out of place.

Much the same as that feature line looks idiotic and out of place on the Miata, which is why I removed it:

There. I feel so much better.

All images courtesy of Mazda. 

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