Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Run away into the sunset

This Reddit user is slightly ranting about the state of the car enthusiast market. How everything that’s new and exciting all cost into the many hundreds of thousands, or millions. The user ends with this nugget: “Do I just buy a Miata and run away into the sunset?”

Insert Leo pointing meme.

That’s me! I literally just bought a brand new Miata, and hopefully shall ride it into the eventual sunset. I too am disappointed at the monetary inflation of the enthusiast market. The special Porsche that was once a stretchable goal for the working man (I literally did it) has been punted beyond any reasonable reach. The manual transmission is a dying mechanical art from, but no worries, McLaren is bringing it back into their lineup… in a limited special priced equivalent to a house.

I can see how that can be discouraging. Unlike the kid with the Countach poster on the wall, working-class car enthusiasts have already come to the realization that we can’t afford a Lamborghini. At least the kid can still dream and strive for a reality that isn’t yet set in stone. 38 year old me? The chances of me ever being able to plop down $250,000 for a singular car is absolutely zero.

Instead of lamenting it, we in the peasant class should rejoice that there are still some options for our income bracket. Just a few options, yes, but kudos to the manufactures for still catering to our niche. My Mazda MX-5 Miata and the Toyota GR86 remain affordable samples of what car enthusiast claim to want: naturally-aspirated engine, real-wheel drive, and a manual gearbox. All for the relatively low price of mid 30,000s.

For sure those two cars don’t carry the social media scene points of a BMW M car or a 911 GT3. You shouldn’t care about that, right? For sheer joy of driving, the two sports cars from Japan is excellent at any price. The fact that they are priced affordably is a damn win for the common enthusiast. Of the two, I picked the Miata because I had one that I miss dearly.

Something it is not

This morning I finally got an opportunity to take my 2026 Mazda MX-5 up to the local mountain roads. The verdict so far is: it’s a bit more floppy than I remembered. And that’s not a bad thing.

Coming out of a BMW M2 that’s flat and sharp at all times, the Miata’s innate softness and rolling character is quite the contrast. With the Mazda you definitely cannot ham fist it into a corner; the driver must work with the delayed fluidity that the car has. You walk the Miata on its tippy-toes, rather than bludgeoning the tarmac with maximum force. The car floats and undulates with the road imperfections, and you have to let it do its thing and not force it into something that it isn’t.

I’ve watch and read many reviews on the ND Miata, and universally it seems people complain about the car’s built-in softness in the suspension. There’s too much body roll. I think problem here is people are taking the incorrect lens to view the car. You cannot treat the MX-5 like a modern sports car. It doesn’t have the flatness or immediacy of a Porsche 911 because it’s not that kind of car.

The Miata is more akin to the 60s sports coupe with skinny tires and massive suspension motion. Watch this Goodwood Revival race for an example of the sort of cars I am talking about. Instead of wishing it corners flatly with quicker reflexes, the driver should work with the MX-5. Let the motion and body roll inform you of how to best chuck it into a corner. Because you can easily tell when the car is upset: massive body lean, but going nowhere quick.

I reckon owners that modify the MX-5 by adding in suspension stiffness fundamentally miss the entire point of the car. I don’t think we should be turning it into a Honda S2000. There’s plenty of other sports cars with firmer suspension and faster steering controls. You buy a Mazda MX-5 because you can dance with it.

Don't be fooled by the algorithm

An anxiety I have in buying back into a 2026 Mazda MX-5 is of other drivers on the road. The Miata is a tiny car, and with the trucking monstrosities that are out on the road these days, the little MX-5 can absolutely disappear. Heck, it was already tough 10 years ago when I had my first 2016 Miata. In the farewell post for the car, I wrote that a major con is other drivers cannot see me. SUVs and trucks have only gotten bigger and wider subsequently. The Mazda roadster? Exactly the same.

It doesn’t help that the main Miata subreddit seemingly serves up daily posts of MX-5s getting rear-ended. Usually the culprit is a modern truck with too tall of a front-end that the Miata can completely hide in front of. While thankfully I don’t live in the land of pickup trucks (hello, Texas), the modern SUVs aren’t that much better when it comes to visibility. It’s a size arms race that I am intentionally forfeiting by buying such a small car.

The anxiety does take away some of the fun from driving. When stopped at an intersection, I can’t help but scan the rear-view mirror to see if there isn’t some truck or SUV dominating the view entirely. Not that you shouldn’t drive defensively in any car, but with a Miata, defense driving is a requirement. Like riding a motorcycle, you have to assume all other cars on the road are liable to bump into you at anytime.

However, I think it’s important to remember that social media platforms like Reddit serves up confirmation bias constantly. Live in r/miata long enough and you might never want to take your own MX-5 out on the road. Frequent r/gr86 and you may think most owners are idiots who cannot drive. Surely every person on r/bmw is paying $1,500 a month on their car note whilst making minimum wage. Worst, the more you interact with those type of posts, the more you get fed the same by the almighty algorithm.

So yes, it seems like lots of Miatas are getting wrecked from behind, going by social media. But there’s no way to know if it isn’t any worse than any other car. I will of course continue to drive defensively - in any of my cars, though I shall keep reminding myself that just because there’s some noise on social media, doesn’t mean it’s representative of real life.

Don't need my business

Before I chose to get a different set of wheels for my 2026 Mazda MX-5, the plan was to powder-coat the stock black 17-inch wheels in silver. The frugal person in me who grew up in poverty can’t in good conscience swap out a brand new set of wheels and tires just because I wanted a different look. The compromise in the middle is to change the color. Black colored wheels on cars is so not the business.

To the Yelp pages!

I’m the type of person who prefer to communicate using email. There’s a freedom of time, and it allows me to tailor my words to be as precise as possible. Specifically to cars, it’s easier to spell everything out in writing. For example, the power-coat color I want is a particular Porsche silver. In an email I can include a link to the manufacturer of the exact color, no ambiguities.

But it seems automotive shops prefer communicating over phone. At least when it comes to wheel repair. I emailed a few local wheel refinishing shops for quotes. One blew me off completely. Another took two days to respond. The one that did timely respond did not follow up, even when I wrote back inquiring how should we proceed to the next step.

I’ve done some sales back in the day, so it’s wild to me that these shops can ignore an entire channel of lead generation. In the year of our lord 2026, email communication is table stakes! The only logical explanation is that business is so good for these wheel repair companies that they absolutely don’t need email leads.

In my stubborn refusal to pick up the phone (changing the wheel color is more of a want, not a need), I pivoted to swapping out the wheels instead. No ragrets.

Death to black wheels

What do you do after you’ve just spent $38,000 out-the-door for a new sports car? Immediately drop more money on it, of course.

My 2026 Mazda MX-5 Miata Club is cursed with something I greatly detest in modern cars: black wheels. Why have a design at all when you can’t even see it? Much like black body paint, black wheels look great for the one second after it’s been cleaned. A quick layer of brake dust later and it turns into a black hole of nothingness. It’s unappealing, and I have no idea why it is so en vogue in the car world.

My 2019 Volkswagen GTI also came fitted with black wheels, and I swap those out with the equivalent style painted in silver. The only trouble is I had to wait five months for the set to be produced and shipped from the fatherland Germany. Painful.

This fourth generation of the MX-5 actually were fitted with silver colored wheels from the factory. The 2016 to 2018 model year of the Sport trim had beautiful eight-spoke 16-inch wheels in silver. Starting with the 2019 model year, Mazda painted those same wheels in, you guess it, black. Yuck.

Because it’s been so long since it was officially fitted on a car, buying those silver 16-inch wheels in the year of 2026 was a challenge. Mazda’s own parts warehouse had only two brand-new-in-box wheels remaining, with no ETA of getting more from Japan. Naturally, I bought those two wheels. To complete a whole set of four, I went to our favorite used car parts source: eBay. I bought two used wheels off of wrecked MX-5s that were in reasonable quality. Not perfect up close, but suffices a few feet away. Beggars absolutely cannot be choosers here.

The 2026 MX-5 Club came stock with 17-inch wheels, so I had to buy new tires as well for the 16-inch set. Only car enthusiasts would swap out a brand new set of wheels and tires. From a utilitarian perspective it is a huge waste. Then again, no one said this hobby of ours is anything but much money down the drain. I’ll do it again.

All in, it was an additional $1,800 spend just because I didn’t like the black color of the stock wheels. Completely worth it.

Shake shake shake

Follower of this website would have figured out I recently bought a 2026 Mazda MX-5 Club. I am back in the quintessential affordable sports car.

Part of the initial ownership process is fitting in a dashcam. With the post-COVID craziness on the roads still very much a thing, video footage is crucial should you have the misfortune of being in an accident. Furthermore, the MX-5 is absolutely tiny relative to the hulking SUVs out there, so if someone were to bump into me unsighted, I want them to get caught in 4K.

It really cannot get easier to wire in a dash cam on the little Mazda. There’s an existing gap between the windshield glass and trim for wires to tuck into. The A pillars are held on by a single clip. And beneath the passenger side dash is a hidden 12V cigarette port for power. It took me all of 10 minutes following this video to install a Vanture Element 1 Pro. Five of which was unboxing the thing.

By the way, you know AI RAM pricing has gone completely bonkers when the 256GB memory card I bought alongside the Element 1 Pro costs more than the dashcam.

A slight quirk with the MX-5 being a convertible is that the windshield shakes quite a bit. Obviously this is because there isn’t a structural roof attached to it. But this presents a problem for dashcams mounted to the windshield. Modern dashcams have G meters that automatically locks a video file should it detect a high kinetic event - say, in a crash. However, the MX-5 windscreen shakes so much and often, the Venture thinks it's in a one constantly.

I found this out because the dashcam kept making a locking sounds every so often. At first I thought it was the cabling rattling against something metallic, until I triangulated the noise back to the Vantrue’s tiny speaker. The solution? Turn off the G meter completely. Even at its least sensitive setting, the Element 1 Pro kept locking the video file. A nifty feature for sure, but completely useless in an MX-5.

It should not cost this much

Used car prices are kind of insane.

On occasion I like to window browse on Carvana and CarMax. Just to see if anything weird and interesting pop up. Recently there was a 2016 Toyota Corolla with a manual transmission up for sale. It brought me back to my very first car: a 2006 Toyota Corolla, also in stick shift guise. It’s very rare to see the common commuter sedan with a manual gearbox. Good on the owner(s) of the 2016 Corolla to have put over 70,000 miles on it. We like to see cars driven.

What we don’t like to see is ridiculous pricing. The listed price on CarMax for that 2016 Toyota Corolla is $16,000. Keep in mind the original MSRP of the car 10 years ago was $17,300! Even if you account for inflation - $24,155 in today’s dollars - 16 grand for a decade old poverty spec sedan is laughable. Especially when it’s equipped with a manual gearbox that nobody wants. This isn’t some Porsche sports car with a stick.

Even if you account for the CarMax premium for let’s say $2,000, a 2016 Corolla still isn’t a $14,000 car. It’s not even a $10,000 car. A gut-feeling fair price for a 10 year old compact sedan is around the $7,000 mark. $8,000 perhaps if the mileage is sufficiently low. Is this simply the era we are living in? Just like how there are zero new cars available for under $20,000, the reasonably conditioned used car for under $10,000 - that every personal finance guru says is available - has also disappeared into history.

I used to have a 2016 Mazda MX-5. That same model year of Miata in today’s market looks to be hovering near $20,000 for a low mileage sample, which is insanity. A decade old MX-5 should be less than $10,000, no matter the miles. It’s not a rare car; Mazda has produced plenty, and continues to do so to this very year. Used examples should not be encroaching on the price of a new one.

Because then why wouldn’t you throw in the extra thousand for one with zero miles and zero farts on the seats? You’d get better financing terms buying new, too. The lower interest costs might even make the price delta disappear completely.