The Bizarre Story Of The Mazda Suitcase Car

There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘last mile’ mobility – compact, efficient forms of transport for zipping around city centres – but it’s really nothing new. Take the Honda Motocompo from the early 1980s, a little folding scooter designed to be stowed in the boot of the City hatchback. Mazda, though, once tried to take the concept to its logical extreme, and the result was… interesting.

For this story, we need to travel back to the turn of the 1990s. These were heady times for Mazda. The MX-5 had just arrived, a car that would go on to single-handedly revive the entire two-seater roadster genre then kill it off again by being too darn good. 1991 saw the 787B become the first Japanese car, and still the only car without a traditional piston engine, to win Le Mans. It was even planning on launching Amati, a luxury brand to take on Lexus, which would have been spearheaded by a large saloon powered by a brand-new V12 engine.

Amid all this, between 1989 and 1991, Mazda held an in-company competition called Fantasyard, challenging its various departments to come up with creative mobility solutions. For the final edition of Fantasyard, Mazda’s transmission R&D team decided to get hold of the largest hard-shelled suitcase and the smallest motorbike they could find. See where this is going?

The result was the Suitcase Car, although ‘car’ might be overselling things. Bits of the hacked-up bike included a 34cc two-stroke engine delivering a 1.7bhp wallop, which was apparently good for up to 18.6mph (although the size of the driver might have some bearing on that).

Supposedly, the transformation from suitcase to car-trike-go-kart thing was a quick one, involving swinging the front wheel out through a flap in the suitcase’s shell, then attaching the rear wheels and seat.

A clever bit of engineering, then, if conceptually flawed. Apparently, it was designed as a solution for getting around airports more easily, although we suspect if you tried to whizz around Heathrow Terminal 5 at 18mph on something belching blue two-stroke smoke into everyone’s faces, you might get into a bit of trouble. We imagine there are also rules against bringing a suitcase full of petrol onto a plane.

Then there’s the other obvious flaw: yes, it did fold into something the size and shape of a suitcase, as this dapper gent is helpfully demonstrating (and no, we don’t know why this Mazda-developed product has a sticker from Toyota’s TRD division on it either). However, you’d struggle to use it as an actual suitcase, because it was full of wheels and an engine. It also weighed 32kg – very little for a vehicle, quite a lot for something designed to be carried around.

Still, as self-defeating as it may have been, the world is a bit of a brighter place for daft creations like this existing. Media coverage at the time led to Mazda building two more for promotional duties, one in Europe and one in the US. Apparently, only the American one is still known to exist – the Japanese original was “accidentally destroyed” (Mazda’s quotation marks, not ours), and the whereabouts of the European one is unknown. If by some outside chance someone reading this has it in their shed, can we have a go?