Mazda R360
car model
The Mazda R360 is a kei car manufactured and marketed by Mazda from May 1960 to 1969. It was the first passenger car produced by the company. The R360 is a two-door coupé with a 2+2 seating arrangement. It has a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout and was designed to be inexpensive and light weight.
History
The R360 was built with the goal of being extremely light weight, as well as low cost. To achieve the weight goal, it was a 2+2 design, with a rear seat not suitable for adults, while the engine was made from aluminium and the chassis also used aluminium and even magnesium alloys. The weight was kept low, only 380 kg (838 lb). The use of acrylics rather than glass for the curved rear windshield and the sliding side glass further reduced weight and cost.
The R360 was an immediate success, thanks to its low price, but sales soon dropped. The four-seat Subaru 360 captured much of the lightweight (kei car) market, which led Mazda to augment the R360 by the four-seater Mazda Carol (P360) two-door sedan in 1962.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1628028. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1969 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mazda R360” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.