Mazda Shinari Concept

Mazda unveiled it’s unique stead in Milan, Italy recently, smack-dab in the centre of international design and fashion.

The Shinari concept – “resistance to being bent” will become Mazda’s new design language that will be ‘spoken’ through Mazda’s future production vehicles.

The creation of the Shinari Concept starts with Ikuo Maeda, Mazda’s global head of design. Maeda was the chief designer of the RX-8 and the Mazda 2 and has been with the company for nearly 30 years, but his connection with the brand goes back even further than that. His father, Matasaburo Maeda, headed the design of the first generation RX-7 back in the 1970s. Mazda runs in the Maeda family’s blood and there’s no one more qualified to define the look of Mazda’s next generation vehicles.

While Maeda has had an influence on Mazda design in the past, 2010 is the first year in which he’s had full control. The Shinari Concept represents the first styling concept under his new design theme, KODO, which replaces the controversial Nagare theme from the past several years. While the Nagare-styled cars were represented by wavy, flowing lines, a trait that looked great on concepts but was tough to implement on production cars such as the Mazda 3, KODO is more of an organic style that still takes cues from the natural world, but in a much more solidified and powerful sense. Maeda describes KODO as form with a soul, or bringing form to life, with the three key terms defining the theme being speed, tension and alluring. “There are few products of industrial design that can be compared to living entities which convey energetic motion and which invite affection,” he says. “It is this intrinsically emotional appeal of the car that I wish to express when creating Mazda cars.”

While Maeda created the theme for the new stylistic direction, the development of the Shinari Concept was actually a collaboration between three of Mazda’s design centres in Japan, Germany and the United States. The goal was to make the exterior a product of Japan, while the interior was left to the automaker’s Irvine studio. However, each team had input on the final product.

The Shinari also features the Human Machine Interface (HMI) that is split up into three modes: Business, Pleasure and Sport. Potential uses range from looking up bios of a business contact before a meeting to a rally-style co-pilot feature that could alert the driver of the characteristics of upcoming turns. It’s nothing too far-fetched given the current levels of technology, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see some of it implemented in the near future.

But more than the tech and the attention to detail, it’s the Shinari’s overall cohesion that impresses the most. Unlike other pie-in-the-sky concepts, the Sinari is a smart, well executed styling exercise that should be a solid design platform for future models. The muscular lines should translate well into a production car, and customers will always appreciate a more sophisticated interior.

In any case, we’d expect this to be a strong resemblance and excuse to call this the RX-9.