Claudio di Benedetto

At Mazda we love driving. In fact, we love it so much we use a Japanese phrase to describe the feeling you experience when driving a Mazda: Jinba Ittai. This translates as “the oneness between horse and rider”, or in our case, the car and driver. Every member of our team is passionate about getting behind the wheel of their Mazda. Half of our senior managers have racing licences and our European CEO recently took part in the Baja 100 race in California. It is in our blood. For over 100 years, all our passion has been put into improving the experience of driving. Not only did we create the MX-5, the world’s bestselling two-seater roadster with 1.2 million sales, and counting… but we were also the first Asian brand to win Le Mans. Not bad for an independent company based in Hiroshima that started making three-wheel trucks in the early 1900s! All our multi-award winning cars are crafted in Japan, where we bring modern twists to globally renowned Japanese aesthetics. We love great looking cars, winning World Car of the Year two times and World Car Design of the Year three times in the last ten years. We are also the only car brand invited twice to show concept cars at the prestigious Concorso D’eleganza Villa D’Este. We also love how cars work. Our unique engineering means we are creating some of the most exciting PHEV and EV vehicles on the market, while continuing to build the most efficient internal combustion engine vehicles. We have a proud heritage, but each of the 1,200 members of Mazda’s European team are also excited about the future. Our goals are clear in Europe: we strive to become the first non-European premium automotive brand by creating great to drive, great to own and great looking Mazda cars.