The Mazda Miata has been with us for well over three decades, becoming the best-selling two-seat sports car in history along the way. Miatas were popular as quasi-sensible commuter cars in North America well into our current century, which means that I should have been seeing at least a couple in every junkyard I’ve visited for at least the last 15 years. In fact, I still see many more discarded MGBs and Fiat 124 Sport Spiders than I do Miatas, so this reasonably intact ’93 in Crystal White paint caught my attention immediately (naturally, there was an ’81 Fiat Spider 2000 a few rows away).
How could it be that a car that has sold pretty well for 33 years and was— at least initially— a hit with car shoppers looking for a fun Point-A-to-Point-B machine would be so rare in your local Ewe Pullet? One word: Racing. Just this month in Colorado, nine out of 60 teams at the most recent B.F.E. GP 24 Hours of Lemons raced Miatas, most of those racers run Miatas in other events and own multiple race cars, and all of them have stockpiled every Miata component they can find in local self–service wrecking yards. Today’s Junkyard Find got picked clean by the team with the purple car in the collage above, a couple of days after I shot these photos.
So, when I find a junkyard Miata, most of the time it will be unrecognizably stripped, crashed, and/or burned by the time I find it. I find about as many 1991–1994 Mercury Capris (front-wheel-drive cousin to the MX-5) in car graveyards as intact MX-5s.
This car must have just hit the inventory a few hours before I arrived.
A mere 162,348 miles on the clock, which is just getting broken in for a Mazda product of the middle 1990s. What happened?
The Front Range region of Colorado gets a lot of hail in the spring and summer, and a close look at the sheet metal on this car shows that every sky-facing surface picked up a golf-ball-style set of dimples from golf-ball-sized hailstones. The insurance company did the math and this car got totaled.
In the street-driving world, automatic transmissions help a car’s resale value. This one has the base five-speed manual; the optional automatic added $750 to the $15,300 MSRP (that’s about $1,535 on a $31,360 car in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars). Miata racers get very excited when they find one of these cars with a slushbox in a cheap wrecking yard, because that means the differential didn’t take as much punishment during the car’s time on the street.
1993 was the last model year for the 1.6-liter engine in the American-market MX-5; its 1.8-liter successor stuck around here through 2004. In 1993, the 1.6 made 116 horsepower.
The US-market 1993 Miata came with an AM/FM/cassette sound system as base equipment, but you had to pay 830 extra bucks for air conditioning. This car has the A/C.
“They said the roadster was extinct, but we made the Mazda Miata anyway.”
For links to more than 2,200 additional Junkyard Finds, please head to the Junkyard Home of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™.
[Images: The author]
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Don’t know of any Miatas that were used as commuter cars in Canada. Not exactly a ‘great’ vehicle to be driving in the winter, unless you enjoy being covered ni slush and spray, possibly getting stuck in drifts/windrows, etc.
So Miatas up here are usually ‘garage queens’. Driven on nice days, with the top down.
In much of Canada, yes, but let me tell you about the magical West Coast…
Vancouver (and Victoria) don’t really live with serious snow, and my aunt, by no means an eccentric car nerd, drove an NB Miata as her only car, all year round. She had the hardtop, which surely helps, but…
That said, even on the West coast, the majority of MX-5s are probably second cars that get parked in the winter, but that’s probably true in much of the US, too. Indeed, now that said aunt is no longer driving, her car remains in the family, but it’s garaged in the Winter (mostly due to an abundance of rainy-day cars in the family).
I’ve seen ones in far worse condition sold for track cars. This one still looks salvageable for one.
@Arthur–Most Miatas around me are definitely garage queens and few hit the salvage yards. Miatas are extremely reliable and give you the best of a British sports car with the reliability of a Japanese cars. If it were so hard for me to get in and out of a Miata I might be tempted to find a good used one with a manual because I cannot think of any other fun car that you could drive fast on a twisty hill road and its not really a fast car. The mpgs are good as well. I doubt this Miata got junked because of its drive train more like as Murilee said it was in a hail storm and the insurance company totaled it. Scotty Kilmer had a Miata on his channel that a person bought for $500 in a salvage yard with Honda wheels that had mismatched panels but the body was rust free and no damage with a good convertible top with a 5 speed and it ran like a top. It was about the age of this Mazda. The guy who bought it was going to put a cheap paint job on it but otherwise there was nothing wrong with it and it ran straight out of the junkyard without doing anything.
Now that sedans are extinct, someone should “build one anyway” (thanks in advance).
some brand needs to use this for advertising.
Shocked that no one has grabbed those wheels yet.
Just curious because my 95M lives in a garage, if hail damages aluminum so badly, does it also shred right through the canvas or vinyl top too?
The smaller stuff will bounce off a convertible roof.
And then you have 1 pound hailstones traveling at 115 mph — those don’t bounce:
https://weather.com/storms/severe/news/2021-06-24-texas-record-hailstone-hondo-confirmed
I’m surprised the team with the purple Miata would be able to use parts off of this car; their race car is a second-gen Miata. I doubt many body or mechanical parts would interchange.
If this car isn’t off of the lot already, I’ll bet it will be soon. Lots of good parts and would make a cheap racer. I still see decent NAs out on the streets. Garage queens, yes, but they still look good after 30 years. Parts are easy to snag, some elbow grease and TLC, and enjoy the summer car!
The auction sticker tells me a lot since I search the auction almost every day. I see plenty of good running vehicles that are being sold as parts vehicles because of title problems. A lot of junkyards then bid on these vehicles, so it’s likely a title problem.
Our 3rd gen Miata is a winter only car- safe in the garage in Florida while we summer in the north. 130k miles and our daily driver.