2024 Mazda MX-5 Review: Unbothered, Moisturized, Happy

You know what’s more satisfying than pulling up to a track day in a fast car? Pulling up to a track day in a slow car and proceeding to dust every fast car in attendance whose owner should’ve invested in more seat time rather than big turbos. Few vehicles encapsulate this energy better than the Mazda MX-5 Miata, and with its 2024 update, the little rear-drive roadster is better than ever.

The Basics

On style alone, the MX-5 is a car with little to no macho pretensions. Even in its sinister, cat-eyes ND era, Mazda hasn’t opted to gussy it up with massive wings or overdone vents. It’s cute. It’s tiny. It sits kinda high off the ground, and if it were a person, you get the feeling that it’d be one of those people who never seems to have a bad day. It is the anti-Cybertruck, the opposite of try-hard, working better at its intended purpose than its looks might suggest.

For 2024, the DRLs are different, wheels are new, and there’s a new shade of gray on the paint list, but style-wise, it’s pretty much the same Miata we’ve known since 2015—yes, the ND is nearly a decade old now. Inside, a new, bigger 8.8-inch infotainment screen runs Mazda’s current knob-operated OS but thankfully becomes a touchscreen when running Apple CarPlay.

The rest of the cabin is charmingly simplistic and novel. Everything feels—flimsy is the wrong word—optimized for lightness and about two notches smaller than they are in other cars. You control the climate using three knobs just like you did in 1995, and while it feels like every other modern car transitions to hella screens for everything, the MX-5’s stubbornly analog gauges (Mazda made the dials pitch black this year for better readability) already feel like a pleasantly quaint throwback.

One 2024 enhancement I rarely see covered in other reviews of this car is the new rearview mirror. It’s frameless now and shaped so that the view it provides perfectly fits with the view in between the headrests. Not an inch of mirror goes to waste and I suspect it’s part of Mazda’s famous “gram strategy” approach to weight reduction.

The seats are nice and comfortable, the sound system sounds alright for what it is, there’s some nice stitching and brightwork to keep it from looking too spartan, and the body-colored tops of the door cards subconsciously make you feel even more jinba ittai—like you’re a part of the car. There are outside bits on the inside!

Driving the Mazda MX-5

Even if the doors didn’t look like that, though, the 2024 MX-5 nails its mission in making you feel at one with the machine—as it’s done for the past 35 years. The headline mechanical changes are a revised steering rack said to reduce friction and improve both nimbleness and precision and a new, asymmetric limited-slip differential that stabilizes turn-in.

Despite it being quite a few years since my last Miata jaunt, the 2024 immediately feels less laterally manic than I remember, exhibiting a more stable personality when tucking into a bend. Don’t think it’s gotten soft, though, because when you ask for it, Mazda’s sports car still darts, hucks, and sends feedback to your fingers like little else with license plates. Steering weight is perfect and there’s real communication going on.

From the factory, the MX-5 rides quite high off the ground for a car of this type, and as a result, it’s quite comfy over rough roads. It isn’t sloppy in the corners, though, because that cushiony suspension merely makes the Miata feel like a more expressive dancer, not a worse one.

MX-5 also continues to do that thing of making tame speeds feel exciting. The 181-horsepower, 151 lb-ft, 2.0-liter four-cylinder makes the 2,366-pound (!) MX-5 feel peppy, fun, and decidedly not slow. It and the six-speed manual go unchanged but one new thing I did notice is this mechanical whining noise while accelerating at low-to-mid revs that almost sounds like a supercharger or straight-cut gears. I have no idea where it’s coming from, and it very well may be artificial. But bottom line: it was an unexpected and very cool sensation and gave the whole thing a cobbled-together, skunkworks-esque feel—like you’re driving something that may or may not be street legal.

The shifter remains wafer light and wafer crisp but it isn’t the hefty weapon some chase after. It’s paired with a clutch that’s also remarkably light and, more importantly, dead easy to operate smoothly. Red-calipered Brembo brakes here admittedly don’t have the toughest job in the world given how little this car weighs, but they’re strong and easy to modulate nonetheless without feeling overly serious in terms of pedal personality.

Taken as a whole, the 2024 MX-5 remains a wonderful car to drive. Manageably exciting, impossibly light, and refreshingly analog, it really is the beacon of light in an oppressively dark sea of overweight, overtech’d, and overpowered performance cars.

Fuel Economy

Lightness doesn’t just make a car better to drive, but it also helps with efficiency. Per the EPA, the manual MX-5 gets 26 mpg in the city, 34 on the highway, and 29 combined. Over more than 200 mixed test miles, I observed 32 mpg—downright great for the amount of fun you can have here. The heavier, bigger-displacement Toyota GR86 and Subaru BRZ twins gulp more fuel than the Mazda regardless of transmission while the automatic MX-5 ekes out slightly better highway economy than the manual.

The Verdict

The fact that the Mazda MX-5—a two-seat, rear-drive, manual roadster made by what is, by most accounts, a small beans automaker—still exists in 2024 is, in itself, worth celebrating. The fact that it’s retained the same formula, retained the same fun-to-drive nature, and weighs just 156 pounds more than the 1989 original is a downright modern miracle.

Yeah, this ND version may be getting a bit long in the tooth now, but Mazda’s commitment to giving it incremental but meaningful updates every couple of years has not gone unnoticed, and this latest ND3 is indeed more refined to drive than before and easier to live with on account of that bigger, nicer screen.

In short, the Miata is still Miata-ing. The Miata is still thriving. The Miata is still smiling. All the Miata wants is for us to be happy.

And, really, isn’t that what life is all about?