From the August 1991 issue of Car and Driver.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, what we have here is the Mazda MX-5 Miata Special Edition, replete with BRG (British Racing Green) paint, beige leather seats, beige carpets, and a beige tonneau cover. Unfortunately, the convertible top is, ah, black. Wrong color, guys. And you can’t get a beige soft top, either, although one may be offered in 1992. But not on an MX-5 Special Edition Miata.

But forget about colors for a moment. The rest of the package includes stainless­ steel door sill scuff plates (a styling cue bor­rowed from Browns Lane), power steering, a limited-slip differential, and a leather­-wrapped steering wheel. We’d have pre­ferred beige leather on the wheel, rather than black, but we’re trying not to say any­thing more about colors. Both the hand­brake grip and the shift knob are fashioned from highly polished wood. The Nardi knob is surrounded by a quarter-inch strip of rubber—a clever flourish that ensures your right hand doesn’t slip and slam into the radio controls. Apart from the seats, all of the beige surfaces in the cockpit are vinyl, not leather.

Inside this limited-edition Miata (“limit­ed” if you regard 4000 of them as limited) are amenities never imagined in the original Lotus Elan. Cruise control (a dubious addi­tion given the Miata’s skittish tracking on Interstates), a CD player, and a pair of stereo speakers mounted in the headrests.

The Special Edition package also includes a beige vinyl tonneau that entirely covers the cockpit. Installing this requires a ten-minute Jane Fonda workout, and you may sacrifice a fingernail as you hitch the thing to the Tenax fasteners at the base of the windshield. But the tonneau is undeni­ably taut, and the right-side leading edge is thoughtfully covered in black vinyl to eliminate glare in the windscreen. That, of course, encourages you to drive the car in the “split tonneau” mode, with the passen­ger’s seat covered—an effective way to transport a friend whose face best remains unseen by, say, neighbors. Because one of the tonneau’s fasteners is at the base of the right side-view mirror, you can’t roll up the passenger-side window. The buffeting that ensues beyond 60 mph incites the tonneau to flutter up and down.

Only three options are available: anti­lock brakes ($900), a detachable hard top ($1400), and a four-speed automatic. Mazda thinks an automatic makes it an entirely separate car (no limited-slip differ­ential here), with a base price of $20,039. You may rest assured we are lobbying for legislation that will make it a federal crime to put an automatic in a Miata.

The MX-5 Special Edition is alluring, but the notion of a 20-grand Miata makes us nervous. The package’s $4949 tariff might be more bearable were the soft top beige (it is black—did we mention this?) or if Mazda got serious about the words “special edition” and commissioned a small run of Miatas with, say, another 20 or 30 horse­power. That would be a Miata worth col­lecting, never mind its color.