This Was Mazda's Vision For An Electric Miata

I was doing a lot of research about the Miata the other day, or, as I call it, a regular Friday, and I came across a very interesting photo. A photo of an electric Miata prototype. What the hell is this thing?

Based on a Japanese market 1991 Miata, the electric Miata stayed in the prototype stage permanently. There is very little known about this car, so I decided to research the back alleys of the internet to see what I could discover.

First step was a quick email over to Mazda. My contact let me know that he first saw it in 1994 when he was working at Toyota. It was Mazda's concept at an event at Disneyland called EVS. This is where Toyota showed the RAV 4 EV and obviously Mazda went a different, non-boring, route and showed a Miata.

After a bunch of Googling, I was able to find some info translated from French. Basically, the Miata EV had 16 batteries under the hood that sent power to a 30 kW motor, which is the equivalent of about 40 horsepower. Now, that's not very much, even for a Miata.

Interestingly, Mazda did keep the five speed transmission from the regular Miata to give it some of that zoom-zoom feeling everyone knows and loves.

But other than that, there is very, very little that I can find on the EV Miata. What, if anything, do you know about it? I'm dying to find more.