How Mazda rode out the pandemic whereas rivals slipped

Written by Brett Berk
The pandemic crushed gross sales of recent autos final yr within the United States, with behemoths equivalent to Ford Motor, General Motors and Honda all posting double-digit declines in gross sales. Altogether, the slide in gross sales reached 15%, with underneath 14.5 million new automobiles hitting U.S. roads, down from a five-year common of about 17 million.
But Mazda — the Thirteenth-ranked carmaker in America — was certainly one of simply three to extend gross sales final yr. (Tesla and Volvo had been the others.)
The crucial accolades additionally piled up. For the fifth yr, U.S. News and World Report made Mazda its Best Car Brand. Every certainly one of its new fashions that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety examined was a Top Safety Pick, greater than some other model. It ranked No. 1 in a Consumer Reports survey on essentially the most dependable new autos. And then this yr, Mazda acquired the highest spot in that journal’s coveted Brand Report Card, primarily based on a mixed rating that measures “road-test performance, predicted reliability, owner satisfaction and safety.”
“During the pandemic, a number of brands were able to take some advantage of getting people to take a look at them,” stated Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, an automotive analysis and consulting agency. “Mazda has had a little bit of an easier time succeeding because, with just 2% of the market, they haven’t had a lot to lose.”
Edwards, whose agency conducts a whole bunch of hundreds of in-depth annual surveys of patrons of recent automobiles, attributed a part of Mazda’s attraction throughout this atypical interval to client perceptions held by its typical patrons. Just as automotive buyers are drawn to Jeeps for the notion of go-anywhere skill and to BMWs for the concept of with the ability to drive at prime pace on the autobahn — even when this stuff by no means truly occur to an unusual proprietor — customers had been drawn to Mazda through the pandemic as a result of the model provided them a fantasy of carefree reduction.
“Mazda owners tend to be younger, single college graduates. They have an income that’s slightly higher than the general population, and they’re less likely to have kids. They enjoy fine dining. They travel the world,” he stated. “So everything that we weren’t able to do this year, this is what Mazda owners love to do. That’s part of the brand imagery.”
And driving was the next-best factor. “Mazdas have this image of being an escape,” Edwards stated.
Also, though it has a cadre of loyalists, Mazda depends closely on “conquest” gross sales — luring customers from different manufacturers — to gasoline gross sales progress. During the pandemic, as potential automotive patrons navigated closed dealerships, dived deeper into on-line opinions and embraced at-home take a look at drives, the small Japanese marque made its transfer.
“With all of the rules being rewritten, they were able to pick up additional people that were reconsidering what vehicles they were going to consider,” Edwards stated.
For years, Mazda sported best-in-class gasoline economic system throughout its whole vary, however it could be finest recognized for its zippy $26,830 MX-5 Miata roadster. The Miata, one of many few inexpensive two-seat sports activities automobiles nonetheless in the marketplace, is an trade bench mark for the price/fun-to-drive ratio.
The $20,650 Mazda 3 compact sedan and hatchback gained the 2020 World Car Design of the Year award, for bringing Italianate styling and driving ardour to a dwindling class; even Volkswagen has stop promoting its Golf hatchback, lengthy a core competitor, within the United States. The $24,475 Mazda 6 is a good-looking household sedan that competes fiercely with the Honda Accord, despite the fact that the Honda sells a dozen Accords for each Mazda 6. It is, nonetheless, being discontinued after the 2021 mannequin yr, one other sufferer of the shift to SUVs and crossovers.
Mazda competes in that bracket as nicely. Its prime vendor within the U.S., the $25,370 CX-5, is a rival to the bestselling Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4 and sometimes even competes with luxurious fashions such because the BMW X3 and Audi Q5.
“When I worked at another auto company, the engineers were taught that value was performance divided by cost,” stated Jeff Guyton, president and CEO of Mazda’s North American operations. “The first day {that a} Mazda engineer involves work, she or he is taught that worth is efficiency divided by weight.
“That’s a totally different mindset. And we do that because weight is the enemy of cost. But it’s also the enemy of fun-to-drive, and it’s also the enemy of fuel economy. So if we judge value as performance divided by weight, we should be able to tackle all of those things.”
Mazda’s distinctive perspective has deep roots. The firm, based as a maker of corks in 1920 in Hiroshima, has at all times been one thing of an outlier.
“Historically, Mazda has been pretty small, pretty independent, and geographically they’re not located in the heart of Japan, where most of the big car companies are, so I think that has also afforded them a bit of that independent thinking,” stated Dave Yuan, senior editor of Japanese Nostalgic Car, an internet site for American followers of Japanese automobiles. “Their very first vehicle was a racing motorcycle, to challenge the dominance of the big British bike brands.”
Yuan credit Mazda’s concentrate on “courageous” engineering for its distinct perspective.
“They tend not to be bound by a lot of the industry conventions,” he stated. “They’re always going to try and seek out things that they believe are the right technology.” This contains, most famously, early and present efforts to tame and maximize the Wankel rotary engine, a high-revving, compact engine with a potent power-to-weight ratio — and inherent difficulties with gasoline effectivity, oil consumption and tailpipe emissions. Mazda engineers are engaged on utilizing the rotary as an onboard generator for his or her first electrical automotive, the MX-30, the place low-stress operating circumstances would permit it to function quietly and effectively.
This spirit additionally encompasses Mazda’s dedication to what Yuan calls “signature philosophies,” equivalent to “what makes a car drive well and what makes a car enjoyable to drive.”
Many ensuing diversifications — the location of gasoline, brake and clutch pedals; the place of seat backs; the way in which an engine builds energy underneath a tough flip — don’t present up on spec sheets. But in day-to-day driving, they imbue Mazdas with a way of refinement and delight.
“They really feel like a boutique, artisanal, intricately thought-out product,” Yuan stated.
Emerging from the pandemic, small automotive manufacturers equivalent to Mazda face vital challenges. The key traits for the longer term are electrification and superior driver-assistance know-how — two classes that require immense funding. Mazda simply doesn’t have this type of capital or scale. So one technique includes a partnership with Toyota, the world’s top-selling automaker.
In this deal, Mazda beneficial properties entry to what Guyton known as “Toyota’s wealth of resources and technology.” But when requested what Toyota acquires, he grew to become a bit extra philosophical.
“I think the Toyota organization looked at Mazda and said, ‘Hey, you guys are consistently competitive in all these big segments all over the world, and yet you have a tenth of the resources we have. If we could have just a little of that in our organization, think what we could do with all the resources we do have.”
The two manufacturers are constructing a manufacturing unit in Alabama, a plant that will — together with present factories from Honda, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai — assist that low-wage, nonunion state change into the second-largest auto producer in North America, after Michigan.
According to Guyton, the automobiles constructed there won’t be “twins separated at birth” — almost equivalent autos with totally different badges on the entrance. Rather, they are going to be extra like youngsters from a blended household: “They’re going to grow up in the same house, but they are totally unique products.”
This dedication to holding Mazda as Mazda can be essential for the automaker’s future. “Subaru has been true to themselves, and they’ve been able to grow every year, even through the 2008 recession,” Edwards stated. “Mazda’s really been true to who they are, and if communicated properly, with their enhancements, they are a competitor coming out of the pandemic.”