11 Facts About Amati Cars

Amati Cars was a proposed luxury brand announced by Mazda in August 1991 as part of Mazda's expansion plan with the launch of the Autozam, Eunos, and ?fini marques in hopes of becoming Japan's 3rd largest automaker.

Amati Cars's efforts were successful and the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 saved the company from bankruptcy.

Mazda's announcement of the Amati Cars division came two weeks after two would-be competitors, Peugeot and Sterling, announced they were leaving the American market.

The compact Amati Cars 300 was going to be an American adaptation of the Eunos 500 sedan which began production at the Hofu plant in early 1992 and was released later that year for the Japanese and international markets.

The mid-size Amati Cars 500 was more ambitious, containing a supercharged miller cycle engine and Yaw controlled four-wheel steering.

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The decision to cancel Amati Cars was made when Mazda realized it did not have the $50 million needed to put the Amati Cars 1000 into production.

Mazda's company-sanctioned museum in Hiroshima and their archive in California contain no artifacts or mention of the Amati Cars project and when car blog Jalopnik created an in-depth retrospective of the brand in 2018, their American sources advised them against seeking information from Japanese sources because it was a "touchy subject" with them.

Indeed, of all the Mazda brands, Amati Cars is the one that appears to have vanished without a trace.

Mazda's announcement of the Amati Cars division came two weeks after would-be competitors Peugeot and Sterling announced they were leaving the American market and four years later Italian luxury brand Alfa-Romeo left the United States.

However, all of the other Mazda executives that spoke to Jalopnik for its 2018 Amati Cars retrospective dismissed the project as "foolish" and "doomed", saying that Mazda did not plan and invest enough and repeating the contemporary attitude that Mazda did not have the cachet to pull it off.

Amati Cars was placed in charge of the Acura division and under his management Acura saw a long period of sales growth and success through the late 1990s and 2000s.