MCALEER: Plenty of value in thinking small - North Shore News
It's a tiny 660cc Japanese kei car from Mazda (actually built by Suzuki), which comes with gull-wing doors and mid-engined layout and turbocharging. I've a great fondness for automotive oddballs, and when you're talking about the Japanese kei-car market, there are few bouncy-balls more odd nor smaller. While many of the little cars that adhere to the rules of Japanese tax law on footprint and horsepower output are boxy and boring, the JDM market is simply filled with stuff that's bonkers. Move up a level and there's stuff like the Nissan S-Cargo and Subaru Sambar wagons, the latter converted to look like VW Microbuses. Two bright spots are the Nissan Micra, which is dirt cheap but has its own racing series, and the Mazda2, which drives with far more zip than you'd expect from such a lightly powered car. A descendant of the convertible Beat, the car is already completely sold out, and it's not hard to see why. The S660 qualifies as a kei car due to its small stature and displacement. This makes it cheap to insure, and with owning an older vehicle in Japan subject to fairly punitive taxation laws, sometimes the newer kei car makes for a great youth buy. But that's not who's buying the scrappy little S660. Honda reports that of the 8,600 cars they've sold so far this year, 80 per cent have gone to buyers over the age of 40. Granted, Japan's aging population and crowded cities likely skew the... Source: www.nsnews.com
