In the late 1980s, Mazda launched an internal competition called "Fantasyard," a creative sandbox designed to encourage engineers to think beyond the assembly line. It was here that a group of seven engineers from the company’s manual transmission unit conceived of a solution for the mundane exhaustion of navigating sprawling airport terminals: a functional, motorized vehicle that could be folded into a piece of luggage.
The team began with the largest hard-shell Samsonite suitcase available—measuring roughly 22 by 30 inches—and retrofitted it with the mechanical soul of a pocket bike. The heart of the machine was a 33.6 cc two-stroke engine capable of producing 1.7 horsepower. To transform the suitcase into a vehicle, a user would pivot the front wheel through a removable hatch, attach the rear wheels to the exterior, and secure a seat above the rear axle. The entire assembly process took roughly sixty seconds.
While the "suitcase car" may seem like a whimsical detour, it carried the DNA of Mazda’s broader design philosophy. The three-wheel configuration echoed the 1931 Mazda-Go, the company’s first motorized rickshaw, while its low center of gravity mirrored the agile dynamics of the MX-5 roadster. Despite weighing 70 pounds and reaching speeds of 19 mph, the project never moved beyond the prototype phase. It remains a compelling artifact of an era when corporate engineering culture felt comfortable indulging in the purely speculative.
With reporting from Designboom.
Source · Designboom
