2009 Mazda Mazda5 Sport 2.3l 7 Passenger Minivan Dual Sliding Doors Cd Changer on 2040-cars

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Mazda teases electric car again with peek at interior

Mazda is again touting the new electric vehicle it plans to reveal at the Tokyo Motor Show, this time teasing it from the inside. A 15-second video homes in on features found on the center console, namely, the blocky shifter for the automatic transmission, a large, knurled rotary dial for infotainment control, and a smaller dial we'll assume is for volume control. As for what else we can make out, if we were to guess, we'd say the slick surface to the right of the shifter is a screen. It'll be interesting to see how Mazda designers filled the space between the seats, but we're surprised Mazda went with such a substantial shifter; this being an EV on a new, dedicated platform, designers could have minimized the focus on shifting and opened up a host of other uses.  A brief press release informs us that Mazda's worked to liberate the cabin from structural clutter, though. The brand says the interior is "designed to give occupants a feeling of being 'enveloped in openness,'" and that the "goal [is] to make spending time in the car a comforting experience that allows customers to be themselves." Empty spaces throughout the center console "create a connection between the driver and passenger seat areas," so perhaps what looks like a free-floating console demo section in the video is what the unit will look like in the car. Elsewhere, the EV will feature eco-friendly materials. The EV isn't expected to make it to America, its powertrain designed to satisfy residents of particularly dense urban environments. The running gear should stick close to the drivetrain developed for the e-TPV prototype, meaning a 35.5-kWh battery powering a single electric motor at the front axle producing 138 horsepower and 195 pound-feet of torque, and a single-speed transmission. Range is thought to be around 120 to 150 miles on a charge. The onboard charger can handle 6.6-kW home charging and 50-kW rapid charging. Eventually, a range-extender version with a rotary engine should join the lineup; Mazda said it chose a rotary because even though it's less efficient than competitors' ICE range extenders, it's so much quieter. The debut of what everyone expects to look like a crossover happens on Oct. 23.

2014 North American Car and Truck/Utility of the Year finalists announced [w/poll]

The 2014 North American International Auto Show is right around the corner, which means it's high time we found out which cars and trucks would be finalists for the prestigious North American Car and Truck/Utility of the Year awards.
The finalists - three in cars and three in three trucks/utilities - are dominated by American brands, with two-thirds of the finalists hailing from either General Motors or Chrysler (don't worry Ford, there's always next year), while outliers from Mazda and Acura can be found in each contest. Here now is the list of finalists for the big prizes:
2014 North American Car of the Year:

The spirit of these 7 weird Mazdas lives on in today's cars

HIROSHIMA, Japan — When visiting the Mazda Museum in Hiroshima, housed amidst the company's main manufacturing site on the shore of the Enko River, you can follow Jujiro Matsuda's early 20th century entrepreneurial path from artificial cork manufacturer to machine and machine toolmaker, to motor vehicle producer. But probe a bit deeper into the exhibits, and you can uncover more than just a chronicle of corporate achievements: delightfully weird outliers, paragons of oddball design, engineering and marketing solutions It's looking at these delightful misfits that really illustrates Mazda's tale. You can also see precisely how many of these vintage conveyances led directly (or indirectly, or obtusely) to Mazda's most iconic American-market cars and trucks. Our seven favorite precursors, and their lovable successors, are listed below. 1931 Type TCS/Mazda B-Series Mazda's first vehicle was this little three-wheeler, powered by an air-cooled, one-cylinder motor. Because the company lacked a distribution network at the time, the trucklet was marketed by Mitsubishi; hence the three-diamond pattern on its side. All of this is very reminiscent of the company's eventual foray into the U.S. market, where its sales were spearheaded by compact pickups. The B-Series, which was one of the first Mazda vehicles available in the U.S., arrived in 1972, and stuck around through the first decade of the 21st century. Like its partnership with Mitsubishi, Mazda teamed up with stakeholder Ford to market this little truck as Ford's first small pickup, the Courier, the precursor to the Ranger. There was even a rotary-powered B-Series for a few years, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. 1968 Bongo Van/Mazda5 The Bongo allegedly was the first one-box van design in Japan, and apparently it was so popular that the name Bongo became, for a period of time, the generic metonym for the category—the way that Kleenex is a stand-in for all facial tissue. With a tiny rear-mounted engine and a planar expanse of metal to push around, it was not particularly fast, but it was both spacious and innovative. The same could be said of the brand's mini-minivan, the Mazda5, which was available for a couple of generations in the States in the Aughties. Sadly, the name 5 never caught on as a synonym for fun-to-drive family hauler, at least not yet, and the category itself (like nearly every other car category) was crushed in America by the rise of the crossover.