Modern art on wheels -- Mazda’s Taiki concept

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All too often, concept cars look unsophisticated and brutish. A dream of the perfect car -- if you’re a 16-year-old boy. So it’s no wonder that an eager crowd of automotive journalists went nuts over Mazda’s concept Taiki when it was unveiled this week at the Tokyo Motor Show.

Concepts are built by manufacturers as design studies to showcase the company’s next styling direction. If that holds true for Mazda’s latest auto show entry, it means a great departure from the company’s usual drab, more predictable look.

Edgy, futuristic and surprisingly elegant, the Taiki promises a dramatically different and charismatic design language for Mazda’s coming models. Not since 1978, when the wildly popular RX-7 was introduced, has Mazda showed so much promise as a design-focused carmaker.

The Taiki, whose name is Japanese for ‘atmosphere,’ uses the concept of airflow as a style element. Swooping lines drape the car’s sides, and the rear wheels are worn catamaran-like away from the car’s body, allowing air to flow between the chassis and the wheels. Inside, color and style are used to illustrate calm and storm, day and night.

The driver’s side is black to bring a dramatic, dynamic energy, while the passenger’s side is executed in white to illustrate calm. The car’s dashboard twists and curves down to the center console like a tornado. Its wheel rims resemble the blades on a jet turbine engine.

The Taiki’s designers held bolts of silk fabric before a whirring fan to see how airflow affects everything around it.

‘When you sit in the car, I want you to feel the wind blow, even if the car isn’t moving,’ says Mazda chief designer Atsuhiko Yamada. ‘It’s all about energy and movement of the air around us and how it makes us feel.’

-- Tara Weingarten, guest blogger