Meet the Shinari, Mazda's latest concept car. Handsome isn't it? An upmarket four-door, four-seat hatchback-booted coupe in the mould of the Aston Martin Rapide and Mercedes CLS.
But what’s most notable about it is how finished it is. Concept cars are normally styling bucks, made of clay or wood, a flash surface with nothing underneath. But this one, unveiled at an exclusive private viewing in Milan and not destined to appear at the Paris Motorshow, has a proper interior and even drives -although the engine noise was a curiously indistinct blend of rotary and piston, ‘to keep you guessing’, an engineer told us.
It is a four-door sedan but it certainly doesn’t appear to be in a usual, boring way. The rear doors don’t have a complete pillar, instead, the roof line just continues all the way over the boot lid in one smooth line. And check out the rear guards that mimic a squatting lion or kangaroo, with it’s big lower leg running along half of the sill.
Translating this initial moment of 'instantaneous movement' being pursued by Mazda design into the Mazda Shinari Concept car presented various challenges to both the designers and the modelers working on the project. The process involved a series of activities that saw the team draw inspiration from a variety of places. This included each team member creating sketches and freely sculpting models from clay to represent their own perceptions of 'KODO - Soul of Motion'. It then continued with the exploration of the functional beauty seen in traditional Japanese crafts and the motion witnessed in Japan's ancient martial arts.
As the team continued this exploratory process, Nakamuta focused on a force so powerful that it can bend a strong section of steel plate. The Mazda Shinari Concept design adds subtle twists and tension to create forms that express agile and powerful movement, resulting in the expression of 'KODO - Soul of Motion'.
