
The Ti Curse is an Unban Legend
On the early forums back when the Mazdaspeed Miata was first being sold a number of accidents or misfortunes always seemed to happen to the Titanium Grey cars. I believe the thinking at the time was the grey cars blended into the background whereas the red cars were much more visible. However, the very limited stats I have re: salvage cars doesn't support that theory today.
I have been able to document 130 salvage MSMs to date which I would guess might be at best 50% of the total. Keeping that in mind the breakdown of salvage cars by colour is as follows:
Black Mica - 11 8.5 % of 130 total
Lava Orange - 13 10.0 % of 130 total
Titanium Grey - 51 32.9 % of 130 total
Velocity Red - 55 42.3 % of 130 total
What do these results mean?
Nothing really, the lower number of produced cars (Black Mica and Lava Orange) naturally have lowest salvage totals while the other two colours (Titanium Grey and Lava Orange) are similar in production totals and number of salvage cars but the Titanium Grey has fewer salvage cars than the Velocity Red.
However the interesting part comes when compared to production totals for each individual colour. Although the Titanium Grey cars were the highest number produced they have the lowest salvage rate. Myth debunked.
Black Mica 2.7 % of total production
Lava Orange 3.3 % of total production
Titanium Grey 2.2 % of total production
Velocity Red 2.4 % of total production