Episode Details

Mazda has never been afraid to try something unconventional. From refining the rotary engine to building lightweight sports cars that prioritize driving enjoyment over outright power, the Japanese automaker has always marched to the beat of its own drum. But few projects capture that spirit quite like the bizarre "Suitcase Car" it built in the early 1990s.

What started as an internal engineering challenge eventually became one of the strangest concept vehicles ever created. To this day, it serves as a showcase of Mazda's creativity and remains one of the company's most fascinating forgotten projects.

A Suitcase That Transforms Into a Vehicle

The Suitcase Car was born from Mazda's "Fantasyard" competition, an internal contest held between 1989 and 1991 that encouraged employees to dream up imaginative mobility solutions. One team of seven engineers from the company's manual transmission testing and research division came up with the winning idea after imagining a quicker way to get around large airports.

Instead of designing something from scratch, they bought a pocket bike and squeezed its mechanical components into a large 57 cm x 75 cm (22.4 x 29.5-inch) Samsonite suitcase. The finished machine could be assembled in about a minute by unfolding the front wheel, fitting the rear wheels, and attaching the seat. Voilà! An ordinary piece of luggage had transformed into a functioning three-wheeled vehicle.

The Miata Philosophy

Despite its comical appearance, the Suitcase Car was a living, breathing car, albeit a painfully slow one. Much like the first-generation NA Miata that was on sale at the time, it featured a low center of gravity and very little power. The original Mazda MX-5 Miata was powered by a 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine producing 116 hp, which isn't exactly a huge figure by modern standards.

The Suitcase Car, however, took things to another level – a lower one that is. Its tiny 34 cc (0.034-liter) two-stroke gasoline engine produced just 1.7 hp. In turn, that was enough to propel the 32kg (70.5 lb) trike to a top speed of 30 kph (18.6 mph), making it somewhat more than a simple novelty.

Mazda's Quirky Spirit Lives On

The Suitcase Car was never meant for production, but it attracted worldwide media attention. Mazda even built additional examples for Europe and the United States, although only the American version is known to have survived. The original was reportedly destroyed by accident, while the European replica mysteriously disappeared over the years.

More than three decades later, Mazda's willingness to pursue unusual ideas hasn't disappeared. Although it still builds objectively great but boring cars like the

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