One thing I always look for throughout my scrapyard expedition is a manual transmission in an unexpected car. Speak, a mercury mystery or a Camry V6 with three pedals. In the early days of small truck boom, some Dodge Caravans And Plymouth Voyager with manual transmission sold (not including Toyota Vans And even Previas), but the Slushboxification Force essentially conquered the world of small trucks for the American market in the late 20th century. Then Mazda decided to create an Americanized version of power for sale here, And that this pickup truck would have a five-speed manual transmission (and a little later, the transmission six-manual speed) as base equipment. This is Mazda5, and some of them actually made their way out of Mazda showrooms in the US without automatic transmissions. This is one of the very rare vans found in Self-service car graveyard in the Denver area.
This Mazda5 is based on the first generation Mazda 3 (and thus the foundational cousin of the first generation Ford Focus), and quite a few Americans bought other things cars with the idea of self-transformation.
A few years ago, I decided to buy a 5 with a manual transmission. This is almost impossible, partly because they are extremely rare and partly because finding one online is difficult (many auto dealers and private sellers believe that automatic transmissions have a +/). – next to the gear lever is the same as the manual transmission, so filtering for the transmission type is useless with these machines). When it was successful, I bought a Japanese pickup truck with dual sliding doors and CVT… and steering wheel on the right side.
Clearly, American pickup truck drivers have enough to do while driving that they don’t want the added stress of picking gears when loading.
The Mazda5 has room for six people, and the sliding doors on both sides prove extremely useful when doing minivan-style things. On paper, it should have sold very well here, but over two generations its best year was 2008 and only about 22,000 units were sold. In 2015, Mazda kills 5 in the United States (although Canadian sales continued for a few more years).
The problem is that it is quite small by US market minivan standards with much less interior space. Also, with the captain’s chairs pictured above, it can only accommodate six people.
There is also the problem that most American families in this century want to drive truck, or at least minivans and hatchbacks with truck-like silhouettes. These are good vehicles, but they are designed for the Japanese market.
Perhaps the lower resale value due to the unwanted transmission would have been enough to destroy this car when something broke.
In its homeland, this truck can be purchased with all-wheel drive. Zoom Zoom!
¡ New house of the future!
Never lose your temper.
