Insight: Designing our Mazda RX-9 coupe concept

It is clear that Rice has huge admiration for the modellers. It’s the one part of the whole industrial process that relies purely on the hands-on skill of craftsmen. It’s interesting to note Mazda’s pride in its clay modelling. It says that a typical size difference between a clay model and a ‘mass-market car’ is between 1mm and 5mm, but Mazda says its production cars are accurate to within 0.3mm to 0.1mm of the definitive clay model.

But the main reason we’ve been let inside the new design studio is to allow Rice and Mazda to demonstrate that the firm’s ‘Kodo: Soul of Motion’ design philosophy is not just marketing hype, but also so solidly grounded that it could be applied to any type of vehicle.

The official line is admirably clear. Mazda’s global design chief Ikuo Maeda says: “It’s about creating cars that embody the dynamic beauty of life. Cars that visually suggest different expressions of this energy. In Japan, we feel that craftspeople inject life into what they make, so objects that receive the love and caring attention of these craftspeople have a vital force; a soul.”

So this is our chance to try to create a ‘Kodo’ vehicle and Rice hands out a brief titled ‘Kodo Recipe’. His four guidelines are brief, to say the least:

1. Breathe life (soul) into your car. Make it more than just twisted metal.

2. Movement through reflection or pure motion.

3. Pure and elegant.

4. Sensual (sexy).

With that, I’m teamed up with senior Mazda designer Kota Atagawa. My self-selected brief is to have another go at reinventing the iconic RX-series. Sure, Mazda has already had a crack at this with the RX-Vision, but I had another idea. The rebirth of the rotary engine is proving very tricky in an age of stringent pollution and CO2 regulations, so why not play to its strengths by using the powerplant as a range-extender in an electrically driven concept car?

Mad? In fact, the company has already built an electric Mazda 2 concept powered by a tiny rotary range-extender. So ‘my’ car will have the rotary engine up front driving a generator. There’ll be two electric motors on the rear axle and tanks for natural gas – powering the rotary unit – behind and beneath the passengers. The result will be an electric supercar with likely CO2 emissions of below 60g/km – very similar to a battery-powered car charged via mains electricity.

So the final design needs to reflect the fact that our imaginary RX-9 has two power sources, one at the front and one at the rear. Inspiration for the exterior styling comes from those multi-coloured computational fluid dynamics (CFD) renderings that show how air flows over the surface of a car or plane or jet engine.

I pull a few images up on my phone to show to Atagawa, who begins to sketch with a black biro. I’m also fascinated by those big, soft surfaces that characterised cars from the beginning of the 1990s – the sort that generate amazing reflections in the right light.

I also sketch a bit myself – it’s 27 years since I left art college – and manage a half-reasonable image of a package showing how the drivetrain could be accommodated. Time is tight, so we spend about 90 minutes sketching before we have to pick one theme for Atagawa to render.