1991 Mazda Rx-7 Convertible Convertible 2-door 1.3l on 2040-cars

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Honda may recall up to 1M vehicles for airbag issue, following Toyota's lead

It seems Toyota won't be the only one recalling the faulty Takata airbag inflators for long. Honda insiders in Japan claim that the company is getting close to announcing its own worldwide campaign that would begin before the end of June.
Unnamed sources close to Honda in Japan tell Automotive News that the company is pursuing an internal investigation into possibly affected models and is working with Takata to gather more information. They claim that it could involve even more than the 1.14 million cars worldwide that the automaker covered under the first recall for the problem in April 2013, including 561,000 vehicles in the US.
Toyota jumpstarted this process last week when it recalled over 2 million cars worldwide, including 844,277 in the US. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began a preliminary evaluation into the issue following six reported incidents, and started assembling data about potentially affected models from Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Chrysler. NHTSA also began investigating Takata itself.

Top Gear recounts the fiery demise of the Mazda Furai

This past September we reported on Top Gear's destruction of the Mazda Furai, one of the finest concept cars to ever grace an auto show stage. It turns out that the Furai, which was burned nearly beyond recognition at the hands of the British magazine, was actually destroyed back in 2008, and that the entire thing had been covered up for five long years.
Now, a few months after publishing that heart-wrenching composite of a half-baked Furai (shown above), the lads at TG have published their account of just what resulted in a priceless concept car being transformed into a smoking hulk on a Suffolk runway. Click over to read the full story about just what happened, along with pictures of the Furai before, during and after the inferno.

Mazda2 successor to ride atop shortened CX-5 platform

Mazda, looking to make the most of its new, lightweight Skyactiv vehicle architecture, will allegedly use a version of the CX-5 crossover's platform to underpin its next-generation Mazda2 hatchback, according to a report from Just-Auto.com. Of course, the Mazda2 is a much smaller vehicle than its larger CUV stablemate, so some serious chopping will no doubt be in order when it comes time to engineer the replacement for the company's smallest hatch.
Currently, the CX-5 and the sleek new Mazda6 share many of the same platform components, and this architecture will already be scaled down to support the next-generation Mazda3 sedan and hatchback, which will debut later this year. Just-Auto.com states that all of Mazda's remaining front-wheel-drive vehicles will eventually switch to reworked versions of this Skyactiv platform, including the replacement for the larger CX-9 crossover.
Also of note, Mazda will reportedly be switching to shorter, four-year lifecycles for its vehicles. This means that the newly launched Mazda6 will be replaced for the 2016 calendar year, with a refresh coming sometime in 2014. That said, vehicles with platforms supplied by other automakers (like the upcoming MX-5 Miata replacement that will share its underpinnings with an Alfa Romeo product) will not necessarily follow this four-year rule.