Masamichi Kogai: People Love To Get Behind The Wheel

The entire auto industry is betting on self-driving cars—except Mazda’s Masamichi Kogai, who believes lots of people love to get behind the wheel

- Joann Muller

Squeezing the accelerator on the Mazda MX-5 Miata as it exits a curve on a twisty back road in Michigan, you can’t help but smile. In the rearview mirror you can see a whoosh of dead leaves rising in your wake, dancing to the hum of the exhaust coming from the car’s high-revving, four-cylinder engine. Mazda’s $25,000, 155 HP roadster is not the most powerful car on the planet—far from it. But with the top down and the sun warming your neck on an unseasonably mild December day, you just want to keep driving forever. It’s that much fun.

Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac, Volvo— not to mention Google, Tesla and, rumour has it, Apple—are all racing to relieve drivers of that fun. Within five years, most automakers say, they’ll offer highly automated cars that can handle stop-and-go traffic and freeway speeds without any driver input. In ten years drivers will be able to work or even take a nap during their commute. Volvo just unveiled the Time Machine, a futuristic cockpit with a 25-inch flat-screen that rotates out of the dashboard as the steering wheel retreats and the driver reclines. Google is developing self-driving cars that don’t even come with a steering wheel or gas pedal.

This is the future, asserts Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk. “Any cars that are being made that don’t have full autonomy will have negative value,” he predicted in a November conference call with Wall Street analysts. “It will be like owning a horse. You’re really owning it for sentimental reasons.”

Not everyone thinks so. “It’s not just getting from point A to point B,” says Mazda’s soft-spoken CEO, Masamichi Kogai, who heads up perhaps the only major automaker that is not working on autonomous cars. “Our mission is to provide the essence of driving pleasure.