1999 Mazda Protégé...Continued

Now Mazda has defined their interior modeling process as "OptiSpace," and while all companies do this in some form, it is especially successful on the new Protégé.

OptiSpace attacks every component from bumper to bumper, seeking to shape and place each one so as to squeeze as much room as possible for people. The result is the largest interior of any car in the compact class, and that includes the Chrysler Neon and the Honda Civic. All the interior components have been carefully shaped to adapt to the human form -- all of it subtle, but the end result is substantial.

In addition there is a 60/40 split rear seat that can fold down to accommodate all but the biggest urban headaches.

The United States is a country of excesses. Everything here is bigger, faster...more everything than anywhere else in the world. That is one of the reasons we are so out of phase with most other countries in our auto industry. We build cars to fit our open highways, our cheap gas, and our large bodies.

Good nutrition, substantial incomes, and a country with lots of open space created cars that were large and inefficient -- until OPEC gave us a wake-up call in the '70s.

There has always been a market for fuel-efficient, inexpensive cars, but few would buy an upscale car that didn't have a V8 and the length of cabin cruiser. We embraced the smaller cars when OPEC raised oil prices during the seventies, we did it with a vengeance. We almost seemed to be doing penance, forcing ourselves into small cars and telling ourselves how politically correct we were.

Now good sense, good design and good engineering are producing elegant solutions to the problem. The combination of cab-forward designs, front-wheel drive, computerized control systems and more attention to completely integrated design processes have all added space and efficiency. Few have done it as well as Mazda.