I Bought My Dream Car A Decade Ago. Here’s How I Hope It Will Grow Old With Me

A little over a decade ago, I bought a first-generation Mazda MX-5 from Germany. I had just turned 30, my life was taking these twists and turns, and I felt like I should have the sort of car that could take them in the best possible way. What a concept! Usually you would get a car that accommodates your life by being spacious and versatile, and in this case I just figured that the least baggage I could take, emotionally, figuratively, or literally, would be the best. That said, the 1993 NA MX-5 I bought did have a zipper rear window, so I could transport longer objects than fit in the trunk.

Fast forward to 2026, and my life is serene and sedate in the countryside. I have an office job, I take my kid to kindergarten every morning when I commute to work, and I still have the Miata. As expected, I nearly never drive it, as it only has two seats and I don’t feel like putting a child seat in something so inherently unsafe. However, today I took it on the road and did my best to reconnect with it.

Getting It Home (Thanks, Guys)

When I found the car for sale online in early 2015, it was pretty much the cheapest running, driving, road-legal MX-5 I could see on eBay Kleinanzeigen or any of the other sales platforms, and a lot cheaper than Miatas already in Finland. It was advertised for 999 Euros in Munich, southern Germany, wearing tired all-season tires on generic five-spoke wheels and a bunch of dents and rust after years of duty as a second car.

It’s sort of the worst Miata color, Silverstone metallic, which kind of suits it but isn’t fun, unlike Mariner Blue, Classic Red, Sunburst Yellow, or Peeling White (I made that last one up, but they do peel). When a local friend of mine went to see it in the January cold, the plastic rear window split as the seller was demonstrating how the roof worked. The price came down further, and for just 770 Euros I was able to get a perfectly fine Miata, complete with a very ugly luggage rack.

With the help of more friends, the car was soon driven north to Finland after some much-needed repairs – as well as needing new spark plugs and camcover gasket, it leaked a lot of oil from the camshaft sensor O-ring. I daily-drove it as-is for a while, on Suzuki Baleno/Esteem steel wheels with studded winter tires.

Making It Reliable

The car had an insistent stutter at high revs, but that turned out to be just the temp sensor, and around the same time I also got the long-overdue cambelt and water pump service done on it.

These cars don’t have interference engines, so it’s easy to leave the belt unchanged for a long time. In fact, the current belt has probably been in there for ten years and should be changed again.

The oil pressure gauge overreads on this car, but a friend swapped out the gauge cluster to verify that the issue is with the car’s original red gauges, and not a case of the car actually having too much oil pressure. Some of the drop links had snapped, and I got those done so it would pass registration inspection for officially importing it.

I soon got the car taxed and plated, and even with those expenses, it ended up costing just a couple grand in total.

Road Tripping It Everywhere

These were some of the best times I had with the car, playing the Miami Vice soundtrack on the stereo, driving in the night, with a lot of the sort of main-character energy that a real hero car gives you, let alone a 115-horsepower, bone-stock Miata with a broken rear window. I put on 15-inch, E30 spec Melber wheels that suited the car nicely, even if they were very heavy.

I also winter drove it with the top down for the heck of it, because I knew I would get the rust and dents sorted out eventually and the car would then become too nice to be driven year-round.

In 2015, I did the longest possible road trip I could imagine doing in the Miata. I drove up to the North Cape in Norway, the northernmost spot on European mainland you can visit by car.

From there, our crew drove down, around the west coast of Norway, across the bridge at the Atlantic Highway (above), through the Hardangervidda national park, eventually reaching the harbor town of Kristiansand. You can tell these photos were taken a decade ago because they have 2015 Instagram filters on them.

We took the ferry to Denmark from there, and in an incredible display of careful planning, drove all the way through Denmark and a large part of Germany to reach the Nürburgring. It was over a thousand kilometers, on a hot day, in a cramped MX-5. I will never drive such long distances in the Miata again, no matter what happens.

During the next couple of days, I did a few tourist drives around the Green Hell, but eventually discovered a coolant leak from a metal pipe in the front of the engine.

It was patched up (you got any gum?), but I didn’t do any ringlaps, as leaking coolant onto the track is one of the worst things you can do there.

The patch held on well enough to get me home, but taking the ferry from Germany to Finland was easy enough on the car. I soon sourced a new secondhand part.

Sorting Out The Cosmetics

A couple years later, I took the car to a paint shop to get the body rust dealt with, and since I said the magic words, “take your time, no rush,” it took a couple years to be done.

The guy was renovating his shop at the same time, so he really did take his time with the car. The finish was really okay, though; not perfect but very much needed.

This was also a good occasion to swap the rear finish panel from a wide-plate one to a narrow-plate one, which visually meant a change from a Euro-spec car to an American or Japanese market car, as licence plates are bigger in Germany.

As well as having the tired canvas top with the broken window changed, I also upgraded to a grey NB-generation top with a glass rear window. It’s not sun-faded, it’s just a lighter grey than these usually have.

I have accumulated a ton of stuff on eBay over the years. The stock black cloth seats are hard-wearing, but the driver’s-side outer bolster developed a hole.

Obviously, the sensible thing to do, then, was to order a complete beige leather interior from abroad, piece by piece, and replace not only the seats but also the door cards and seatbelts, and the beige plastic parts that go in the footwell and around the seatbelt towers.

It looks a lot fancier, in an OEM+ fashion, even if Mazda never offered the tan interior with the silver exterior. To complete it, I would need to replace the dash pads and paint the bottom half of the dash, but I’m not going to do that – because I also have the same goddamn set in red.

That’s right, I also have enough interior parts to convert the car to a silver ’93 Miata LE, because I’ve also sourced a nearly complete red interior, down to the dash pads and carpet.

Mazda only sold left-hand-drive cars with the red interior for one year, and they were all black, but there have been enough RHD Japan-import Eunos Roadsters in the UK to provide a lot of interior parts that aren’t steering-side dependent, such as the seats, door cards, and some of the plastics. I’ve gotten the necessary LHD parts from the States, piece by piece. I even have a complete spare dash in case I want to try painting the bottom part the correct shade of red.

It’s the combination of rarity, strangeness, and coolness that really speaks to me, and the red interior would look great in a silver car. Mercedes-Benz offered that for some SLK generations, for example, so it works.

Why, then, don’t I have a silver Miata with a red interior? Because I don’t have the time, and the time I do have, I’m distributing between work, family life, and keeping my other cars on the road – the ones that are on the road, such as the Corolla.

There are a lot of people who juggle a lot of roadworthy cars, but with the Miata, I’ve just become accustomed to getting it out of storage every summer or autumn, getting it inspected, driving it around a bit, and storing it. This isn’t enough to keep it nice or to let it flourish, but it’s enough to keep it lubricated and inspection-able a year on. As it sits for longer periods, the idle is currently a bit sticky, and usually it gets better after a bit of driving.

In actuality, I should strip out the whole car not only to replace the interior with the one I’ve stashed, but also to get the subframes out and replace all the bushings that actually make a difference in the way a Miata handles. Mine isn’t tight, and overhauling the suspension would probably make it absolutely brilliant, but at the moment I’m just happy it passes inspection.

The stereo should come out, and in fact I have the 93 LE-specific, silver-faceplate Mazda MSSS sound system head unit that hooks up with the headrest speakers. I have three of those in fact, plus a couple more OEM Panasonic stereos, a double-din head unit from a Dodge Stealth (because those have an AUX connector and look great in a Miata), three Kienzle mechaless head units, and a NOS JVC stereo from circa 1993.

The current head unit in the car also has an AUX, but it otherwise sucks, as do the speakers, and the antenna isn’t hooked up because someone snapped the cable the last time anyone did anything with the audio. It’s a lot easier to order rare parts for the car than to decide which ones to fit and how.

I don’t plan to sell the Miata. In my view, to have been able to score a first-gen MX-5 for about a grand is something that’s incredibly difficult to do ten years on, and will be impossible in the future. Maybe I’ll have the time to properly dial in the car when I’m 50, as long as I’ll be able to get down into the driver’s seat ten years from now. Or twenty.

There’s a Japanese guy on Instagram with the cleanest Miata anybody’s ever seen, and even if I like watching his reels, every one of them makes me feel the slightest tinge that mine isn’t ever going to be as nice. But like him, I also have a Miata.

Today I took the car out, got the oil changed, put some fresh and expensive fuel in the tank, and drove straight to the inspection station where it passed with zero advisories or demerits. My life and MX-5 ownership isn’t really in a “Jinba Ittai” (rider and horse as one) sort of state, more like whatever “man and his beat-up Toyota Corolla as one, with the Miata in the garage” is in Japanese. But driving the car, even once a year, keeps it from becoming a stationary object like a couple of other project cars I have. The Miata is just too special for that.

Top photo: Antti Kautonen