2022 Mazda MX-5 Miata Review - All play, no work!

In 2019, Mazda gave the MX-5 Miata's two-liter, four-cylinder engine a shot of espresso. It bumped up the horsepower from 155 to 181. It bumped the torque from 148 to 151, and it shot up the redline to 7,500 RPMs, and that all made something that was inarguably good, undeniably great. Now, we call those post-2018 Miata's ND2 Miata's, because they're the ND generation after the NA, NB, and NC generations, but while the engine wasn't enough to qualify as a full generational redesign, it felt dishonest to call it just an ND, to lump it in with those pre-2019 cars. Between you and me, I have never actually had the opportunity to drive an ND2 Miata. I didn't know what it was all about, but all that changes today, because we are testing a 2022 Mazda Miata RF, and I'm going to spend as much time driving as I possibly can. But of course, if I want to make a living driving cars like this, then I need to ask you to please remember to subscribe to the CarGurus YouTube channel. And if you have a car to sell, well, consider selling it online with CarGurus. We can source you an instant offer from thousands of dealerships, we'll help coordinate getting the car picked up, and we will get you paid. There's something else new on the 2022 Miata. It's called Kinematic Posture Control, or KPC, and it's not new to sports cars, but it is new to the Miata. Essentially, the car applies a slight brake to the inner wheel during high-G corners to help improve stability. Stuff like this is usually good for a media press release, but not usually noticeable in actual real-world driving. And to be sure, you have to find the right set of corners, but if you do, well, KPC is noticeable on the new Miata. Mazda has a philosophy to building cars, it's called Jinbai Itai, or something like that. Maybe I mispronounced it. Anyways, it means horse and rider as one, and I've always thought of it as building a car that's just intuitive to control, that responds to inputs quickly and accurately. But that's only half the story. Driving a car like this, you can respond to the car nearly as often as the car responds to you. The Miata is incredibly communicative, and my favorite example of that is right here, the gear shifter. The six-speed manual is short and precise, purposeful, but it's also alive with vibration and feedback. It protests when you rest your hand on it idly, telling you to get your hand out of the way, or you're going to wear out its mechanicals. Everything in here acts like that, the way the throttle just begs you to pile on more, and the brakes respond almost telepathically, the clutch has this long travel to it, but a crystal clear bite point, and the suspension, how it's almost purposefully undersprung, you really feel the car leaning through each corner. The steering wheel is this amazing, delicately thin piece of design. It's a throwback to the cars that inspired the original Miata, old British roadsters that were tough to keep on the road, but were enormous fun when they were out there. I'm driving an RF Club trim, which gets BBS wheels and Brembo brakes. You can also get these for $4,500 on the Soft Top Club trim. For four-season use, this is the Miata to get, as that hard top just makes life a little easier when the skies open up. But hard top or soft, next to pretty much every other car on the road, this one looks a little ridiculous, and from a design standpoint, the Miata seems a little confused. The headlights are somewhat comical, what with their little angry squint. It's like a little kid who's trying to look all tough and mean. The opposite is true from the back, where the perfectly round tail limbs look out at cars behind you with some goofy look of wonder. If you hadn't noticed, this car seats two. Mazda doesn't do half-measures, and I doubt there was ever any consideration given to making the Miata a 2-plus-2 layout. If you want a sports car, the Miata gives you the full sports car experience. Our car has black Recaro seats that are very comfortable and keep you in place nicely, but they don't have any lumbar support adjustments. Anyone who's past their physical prime might find their back feeling a little tired after a long drive in a Miata. Anyway, the heated Recaro seats are standard in the RF Club, but they're unavailable in the RF Grand Touring. That said, the Grand Touring can be equipped with beautiful terracotta Nappa leather. Frankly, it's wild that this car is on sale in America in 2022. It seems to contradict all of the normal reasons that a car might be available in another market, but not here. It's too small. It's too impractical. It doesn't have a very powerful engine. Mazda sold 10,000 of these in 2021, which was actually a good year for the car. None of the normal business cases seem to matter. And on that too-small point, I'm not joking about that. This is not the vehicle for 99% of shoppers. You get very little trunk space, just 4.59 cubic feet, and hardly any interior storage either. These two cupholders are standard and they're removable, but in this position they're also really awkward to access, and frankly they're good at holding your drinks, but they're not actually great if you want to access those drinks. So I'd recommend actually popping this out, and if you don't have someone in your front passenger seat, there's a little slot where you can stick this up there. It'll dig into their legroom a lot, but if there's nobody there, you just stick it in there, makes it a lot easier to access from the driver's seat. But I do have someone there, so I'll just hand this to him. And in terms of a glovebox, well, I don't have a glovebox in this car, at least not up there. Instead, Mazda fits this little locking cubby behind this absurdly tiny center console bin. On the bright side, parking is a breeze. This car has such a tidy turning radius that it feels like you can squeeze it just about anywhere. A lack of space is expected in a car this small, you knew that. But listen, the Miata is not going to fare well against a pickup truck or an SUV or even a minivan in a crash, and that is something worth considering. And it's clear that Mazda knows this as well, because it has fitted the Miata with a few bits of advanced driver assistance tech to help you avoid that game of chicken in the first place. A pre-collision braking system and lane departure warning come standard, as does rear cross-traffic alert. What I really appreciate in the Miata is the standard blind-spot monitoring system. Even with the top down, the RF has these big buttresses that sit dangerously close to my blind spots. Merging right actually isn't that terrible, but merging left, where I really can't see anything, is a little hairy. Luckily, the blind-spot monitoring system will let me know if I have the all clear. Now the only tricky part left is actually one of these situations, where I have a left turn at this obtuse angle and I'm left kind of looking over my passenger just to see if I can go. Neither the NHTSA nor the IIHS have crash tested the ND Miata, but the Euro NCAP gave it 4 out of 5 stars. I don't know, man. This car is so small, just, just don't crash a Miata. The Miata's other tech offerings are delightfully slim, and they are outdated at that. We're still looking at the 7-inch display that I believe the company has moved on from in every other model. It was still in the 2021 Mazda 6, but that was well known to be a dead man walking, or dead car driving, I guess. I wouldn't have expected to see a new UI in a car that was immediately headed to the chopping block. Now, this is not a touchscreen unless the car is stationary, and that's arguably a safety feature, because touchscreens demand that you take your eyes off the road in order to use them. That said, the rotary controller can be frustrating enough to create its own safety issues, especially if you're running Android Auto. On that note, Apple CarPlay is now available via a wireless connection, which our video producer loves. I still need a wire because I have a poor little Android phone. Our RF trim also has a 9-speaker Bose stereo, although you hardly realize that it's an upgraded stereo. I like that there are these speakers in the headrest, but I don't get the same high-fidelity sound in this car that Mazda and Bose were able to engineer into the Mazda 3 sedan and hatchback. I've largely been using either Bluetooth connectivity for music or just listening to satellite radio during my week with the Miata. My test car isn't equipped with navigation, and I haven't really bothered to use Android Auto's Google Maps because of the aforementioned frustrations with the rotary controller. And that means that I have gotten lost a few times, but that's kind of the beauty of the Miata. I mean, you're not upset when you get lost because it just means you get to spend more time behind the wheel. Finally, let's get to money. Specifically, how much of it are you going to have to part with in order to get a Miata in your garage? Well, it is getting a little pricey, particularly in RF trims. If you can live with a soft top, then do that because it starts at a much more attractive $27,650 plus a $1,065 destination fee. The RF is defined by its hard top, which puts it in more direct competition with a Toyota 86 or a Subaru BRZ. The Miata RF is less powerful, it's less refined, it offers less space, it's less practical, but it costs $7,000 more, and that's just the price of a retractable roof, apparently. My test car runs $40,000, just about, $40,000 for a car I could very nearly fit into a shoebox. But I would venture to say that the Miata doesn't actually compete directly with either of those cars. For one, the Subaru and the Toyota, I mean, they both pretend at the very least to provide some degree of practicality, but the Miata, Mazda gives you the Spirit Airlines approach. I mean, you want a sports car, we'll give you a sports car in the barest sense of the word. And that, my friends, is the only time you'll hear a Spirit Airlines comparison as a good thing. Because the Miata is a truly unique gem in the American car market. There's nothing quite like it, it is a pleasure. It is all play, no work pleasure. You feel like you're going at the speed of sound even when you're going 45 miles an hour. It's just fun all the time. You can't buy this car for cruising along back roads and going to Lowe's, you can't buy this car for track days and going to the grocery store, and you can't buy this car for mental health and taking the kids to soccer practice. With the Miata, you just get the back roads and the track days and the mental health. And I wouldn't have it any other way, because any other way, it wouldn't be a Miata.