A 2007 Mazda MX-5 Miata wearing a handmade Aston Martin body is sitting on Bring a Trailer right now with a bid of $20,500 and counting. It’s absurd. It’s charming, and it says more about the NC Miata’s reputation problem than any think piece ever could.
The car is the work of Simpson Design, a tiny coachbuilder out of Clinton, Washington, run by a man named Jim Simpson who has spent years grafting European elegance onto Japanese reliability. This particular build gets an entirely new front end with an Aston-style grille, reshaped headlights, hood scoop, and front fender vents, plus a restyled rear and 16-inch wire wheels with knock-off hubs. The door skins stay Mazda, but the handles come from a Lancia Flavia, and it’s reportedly one of two made.
Inside, there’s a wood-rimmed Nardi steering wheel stamped with an Aston Martin logo, wood dashboard trim, and fixed-back vinyl bucket seats. Pop the hood and reality snaps back into focus: Mazda’s 2.0-liter MZR four-cylinder, complete with the Mazda badge right on top, making 166 horsepower and 140 pound-feet of torque. It breathes through a six-speed automatic, which won’t thrill the heel-toe crowd but will make this an easy daily driver with just 26,000 miles on the clock.
The NC Miata has always been the generation people love to dismiss. It arrived in 2005 bigger and heavier than the NA and NB, with styling that split opinion — too rounded, too soft, too happy-looking for some tastes. Enthusiasts tolerated it but rarely celebrated it.
On the road, though, the thing drives beautifully. The chassis is communicative, the steering is honest, and the 2.0-liter has enough shove for a back-road grin. Simpson Design understood that tension perfectly — the NC’s driving dynamics were never the problem, its face was.
The craftsmanship is genuinely impressive for what amounts to a one-man-shop operation. Simpson is America’s answer to Mitsuoka, the Japanese coachbuilder that turns Miatas into miniature Jaguars and Corvettes into something resembling a Stingray from a fever dream. The difference is scale — Mitsuoka has a factory and a catalog, while Simpson has a workshop and a waiting list measured in single digits.
There’s a practical upside that separates this from most custom builds: everything mechanical underneath is bone-stock Mazda. Any dealer in America can service it, parts are cheap, and insurance won’t require a specialty policy. You get the visual theater of a bespoke British roadster with the running costs of a Miata, because it is a Miata.
The fog lights aren’t connected. The Aston badge on the nose isn’t fooling anyone who knows what a DB9 actually looks like. The proportions are too compact, the stance too modest, but that’s exactly the joke, and the car is in on it.
With five days left on the auction as of this writing, the bidding will likely climb higher. A clean NC Miata with 26,000 miles and a six-speed automatic might fetch $12,000 to $15,000 on its own. The coachwork, the rarity, and the sheer conversation-starter factor add a premium that’s hard to quantify.
The real question this car poses is simpler: if the NC Miata needed a body transplant to get people to finally appreciate it, maybe the car was always better than the community gave it credit for. Simpson Design didn’t fix the driving experience. It just made people willing to look twice.
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