Mastretta
Encyclopedia
Mastrettadesign Tecnoidea SA de CV (or simply Mastretta) is a Mexican
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 car maker and design studio established by Mexican industrial designer Daniel Mastretta
Daniel Mastretta
Juan Daniel Mastretta Guzmán is an Mexican engineer and designer. In 1987 he founded Mastretta Design, a design and automotive company...

 in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...

 in 1987. Mastretta under Tecnoidea and Unidiseño brands has previously developed a small number of kit car
Kit car
A kit car, also known as a "component car", is an automobile that is available as a set of parts that a manufacturer sells and the buyer then either assembles into a car themselves, or retains a third party to do part or all of the work on their behalf...

s, but the 2010 MXT
Mastretta MXT
The Mastretta MXT is the first high performance sport automobile produced by the Mexican car maker Mastretta, and is notable for being both completely produced and designed in Mexico, as well as the first fully Mexican made sports car...

 is the first fully self developed car . It often incorrectly claimed to be the first ever mass-production sports car completely designed and produced by Mexican engineers and designers, but Mexican automotive companies Dina
DINA S.A.
DINA is a Mexican automotive producer of heavy duty and specialty trucks, urban buses, armored military vehicles and intercity coaches...

 and VAM
VAM
VAM is a three-letter abbreviation which may refer to:*Vallourec and Mannesmann - VAM is the trademark for their oilfield tubing-connection screwthread*Vesicular arbuscular mycorrhiza*Vitt Ariskt Motstånd...

 had developed cars indigenously decades before. It is only the third Mexican high performance sports car
Sports car
A sports car is a small, usually two seat, two door automobile designed for high speed driving and maneuverability....

 ever; it was designed as a market competitor for the Lotus Elise
Lotus Elise
The 1996 Lotus Elise weighed . Because of its relatively low weight, it was able to accelerate 0- in 5.8 seconds despite its relatively low power output of...

.

History

During the 1990s, Mastretta focused on microbus (Mexico City metropolitan minibuses) body chassis
Chassis
A chassis consists of an internal framework that supports a man-made object. It is analogous to an animal's skeleton. An example of a chassis is the underpart of a motor vehicle, consisting of the frame with the wheels and machinery.- Vehicles :In the case of vehicles, the term chassis means the...

 and engineering as well as urban buses. This would lead to the construction of their first kit-car in 1998, the Unidiseño Mastretta MXA. The Unidiseño Mastretta was built over a Volkswagen Sedán
Volkswagen Beetle
The Volkswagen Type 1, widely known as the Volkswagen Beetle or Volkswagen Bug, is an economy car produced by the German auto maker Volkswagen from 1938 until 2003...

 (Mexican VW Type 1) chassis and platform; also, the VW Boxer inline-4 was used for the prototype but with 44 bhp, the car reached a top speed of 127 kilometre per hour. The few hand-made units were exported to Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, where the kit-car marketing was attractive for many collectors at the time. Around two remain in Mexico but they're owned by Mastretta. A variation of the same model, the MXB was built. It featured different headlights and other minor modifications.

Automóvil Panamericano
Automóvil Panamericano
Automóvil Panamericano or simply Automóvil is a Mexican automotive enthusiast magazine first published on 1995...

car magazine's February 1998 annual edition of Modelos (Models, a special catalogue with information about every commercial model on Earth and since that year, a few pages dedicated to kit-car makers) featured a paragraph on the Unidiseño Mastretta, and since then it hadn't been heard of it
Nine years later, in their #149 issue for June 2007, the magazine would announce the production of Mastretta's third car, the MXT and now along Daniel Mastretta's company under the name of Tecnoidea. According to the magazine's article, the MXT is currently on its final stage for pre-production, which will start in early 2008. Also, it will mount a 200 bhp 2.3i engine which would allow the lightweight coupé to reach 230 kilometre per hour on top speed.
Mastretta will open its first factory in late 2007 with a capacity of 150 cars per year.

Logo

Mastretta's logo features a non-sharped shield with the Mexican flag colours green, white and red and a diagonal black and white race strip in representation of the Mexican coat of arms, and to avoid confusion with the Italian flag. "Mastretta" appears on the top.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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