Word: miata
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...California. If you're to succeed in the U.S., you must sell in Southern California. And to do that, observes Peter Fischer, a marketing vice president at Volkswagen, "you have to see, feel, smell what these customers want." Says Mark Jordan, who was Mazda's chief designer on the Miata: "If you can excite the people in California, the rest of the country will take care of itself." The world's car companies have been drawn to L.A. by the same giddy promise -- a fresh start, anything goes -- that has always pulled in immigrants. Detroit has been creating cars...
...Newport Beach. He found the GM experience "kind of stuffy. Everyone was divided into units for different aspects of design. Here we can sit down and talk about a project from ground up." Jack Stavana, Mazda's director of product planning and research who masterminded the marketing of the Miata, agrees. "Frankly," says Stavana, who worked for Chrysler for five years, "I needed to get out of Detroit, because there weren't fresh ideas there. We start with a fresh sheet of paper...
...Japanese companies that seem to take their Californians most seriously. Of the two dozen or so cars that have been largely or entirely designed in California over the past 15 years, most have been Japanese, notably the Miata, Honda's sporty CRX and Toyota's Celica. Mercedes, which set up shop only last October, plans to have a California prototype by the end of next year. The other Europeans are proceeding more timidly. The sort of California innovations Audi expects in the near term, for instance, are tilt- down steering wheels and dashboard coffee-cup holders...
...Miata, with its convertible top and intense colors, is the only product of the Los Angeles studios that exudes a distinct regional pizazz -- the first truly postmodern automobile, both a reinterpretation of and an improvement upon nostalgically recalled classic sports cars. Yet despite all the drafting tables suddenly clustered together, the Miata does not signal the emergence of a canonical L.A. style...
...cars that thrill. The most successful California designs have been tough-but-smart, fun-but- practical Middle American vehicles (Toyota's Previa minivan, Nissan's Pathfinder, Isuzu's Trooper and Amigo) or else sports cars that temper the species' inherent sexiness with a certain grownup decorousness (the Celica, the Miata...