Mazda MX-5 Cascade Edition Shooting Brake
When Mazda’s North American design group quietly began studying how to make the MX-5 more useful in the rain-soaked, mountain-laced Pacific Northwest, they didn’t look to convertibles for inspiration — they looked to Europe. Specifically, to the classic “shooting brakes”: sleek, elongated two-door wagons that blended elegance, practicality, and a hint of mischief.
The result was the MX-5 Cascade Edition, a limited run of just 200 Northwest-only shooting brakes. Built as an experiment to test whether adventure-minded drivers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana would embrace a Miata with more gear space, more weather resilience, and a uniquely sculpted rear profile, it became one of Mazda’s most whispered-about special projects.
The transformation wasn’t simple. Engineers in Hiroshima collaborated with designers in Irvine to stretch the roofline rearward while keeping the MX-5’s signature proportions intact. The extended rear quarters — subtly echoing old Japanese long-roof “lifestyle wagons” — melded with the traditional European shooting-brake silhouette. The result was a harmony of cultures: Japanese purity of form meets the utility-forward sensibility of an American station wagon, filtered through the design language of classic British and Italian two-door estates.
Mazda gave the Cascade Edition slightly firmer suspension tuning for mountain-road stability, all-weather interior materials, and a bespoke color palette meant to mimic the PNW landscape: basalt gray, alpine white, and fire-sunset red.
Here in Sun Valley, Idaho, a few of the very first customer cars have just been delivered — quietly, almost anonymously — to enthusiasts who wanted something playful, practical, and entirely unlike any MX-5 the general public has ever been offered.
Note
This concept was originally a personal design I created about eight years ago but never built in real life. With the advent of AI, it’s been fun taking my original re-imagined images and compositing them into realistic scenes like this — as if these little shooting-brake Miatas really did make it into the world, even if only on-screen.