For a brief time before the pandemic, excitement about electric vehicles and improvements to battery technology led automakers to come out with a bunch of big ideas for micromobility.
The fascination with making automotive products as small as possible goes back well beyond that, though. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Japanese automakers also wanted to solve the so-called "last-mile conundrum" with tiny vehicles that could take drivers from their vehicles that were stored in a massive parking lot to their actual destination. That famously led to the Honda City Turbo II, a subcompact hatchback that, despite its diminutive proportions, managed to squeeze a tiny moped (dubbed the Motocompo) into its trunk, which owners could ride to their destination.
But Honda wasn’t the only automaker that sought a tiny solution. Mazda tried to tackle this issue, too, with something that came to be known as the “suitcase car.”
You may be asking yourself, "Is that exactly what it sounds like?"
Yes, is the answer, though the word “car” in this context may be a bit of a stretch. However, unlike the Motocompo, which looked a bit like a briefcase, riders weren’t expected to straddle Mazda’s creation. Instead, they opened the suitcase (literally a Samsonite hard shell suitcase, at first) and sat on it like a go-kart.
The vehicle, such as it was, was powered by a 34-cc two-stroke engine borrowed from a pocket bike, which made 1.7 hp. A top speed of 30 km/h might not sound impressive, but may well have been terrifying on such a small, rickety platform. Further adding to the likely terror of it all, the suitcase car featured a tippy three-wheel layout, with a single wheel at the front. This, however, had historical significance for Mazda, whose first production vehicle ever, the Mazda-Go, was a three-wheel rickshaw that was first sold in 1931.
According to Mazda, the suitcase car took less than a minute to transform from a suitcase (full of engine) into a (not terribly useful) vehicle and, per this 1994 clip from The Oprah Winfrey Show, featured headlights and a horn. It also tipped the scales at an arm-straining 32 kg (70 lb), suggesting that it would have caused the owner a lot of problems at the airport — which, incidentally, is exactly where this vehicle was supposed to be.
According to its creators, a group of seven engineers from Mazda’s manual transmission testing and research unit, the suitcase was designed to help passengers get around airports more easily. Admittedly, the people behind the project likely didn’t expect their invention to end up on Oprah, as they had dreamed the product up as part of an in-house competition to see which department could come up with the most creative mobility idea.
Referred to as the Fantasyard, the competitions took place between 1989 and 1991, when Mazda was, in many ways, at the height of its power. Fresh off becoming the first Japanese automaker to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, the creation of the MX-5 Miata, and in the midst of becoming one of the only automakers to successfully market a rotary engine (it’s still the only automaker to ever win Le Mans with such a power unit), things were going well for the brand, and it was apparently happy to market itself as a manufacturer of oddball vehicles.
Naturally, mass production was never seriously considered,l but Mazda did build three units of the suitcase car: one for Japan, one for Europe, and one for North America. Sadly, only one remains today. The fate of the European model is a mystery, according to the automaker, while the Japanese model was accidentally destroyed, meaning that only the North American model remains.
While the notion of a two-stroke engine pumping fumes out into a crowded airport (no matter how filled with cigarette smoke they already were in the early '90s) makes the suitcase car a silly idea from its very conception, silly ideas are often the most fun to drive, and the vision of an airport full of business executives and families zipping around as if they were in Mario Kart is certainly an appealing one. Thanks to recent improvements in battery technology, not to mention Honda’s revival of the Motocompo (now the all-electric Motocompacto), we humbly submit to Mazda that it’s the perfect time to bring this idea back from the junk pile of history and make it an all-electric reality.
