The Mazda MX-6, along with its Ford Probe sibling, was built in a Mazda plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, just a stone’s throw from Ford’s historic Rouge complex on the edge of Detroit’s city limits. It was an unusually successful joint venture, compared with the tweedledum-and-tweedledee packages that seemed to result when American and Japanese companies join forces to manufacture two models that end up as mirror images of each other.
Mazda provided the basic component engineering and manufacturing expertise, while each company designers and engineers developed exterior shapes and fine-tuned their respective chassis to make two distinctly different vehicles. Compared with the highly sculpted Probe, the MX-6 was more basic, less contemporary. Ford’s version was a liftback, while Mazda offered a simple coupe with a smallish trunk. The additional weight of the structure needed at the rear for the liftback gave the MX-6 a significant weight advantage.
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