Basic off-the-shelf Miata upgrades

Published 2024-05-28 by Francis Usher (last updated 2024-05-31)

A few low-effort quality of life upgrades you can just buy.

I’m not really in the business of product reviews but I figured to kick off this blog with some easy content I could detail a few of the off-the-shelf upgrades I bought soon after getting a Miata. To be clear I am not sponsored or affiliated and don’t necessarily recommend any supplier, I’ve just included links to purchase them for the readers’ reference.

The upgrades I selected aren’t very expensive, aren’t hard to apply, and can be reversed easily once applied.

Front license plate mount - $100

The stock Miata doesn’t come with a front license plate included. In fact there’s no obvious way to mount a license plate without drilling holes in your front bumper. No shot I’m doing that to my pristine new car!

Some jurisdictions require a front license plate by law though. Even if your local police are typically lenient on this law, it’s more likely that your zippy little sports car will attract a citation than some random Tesla. Personally I’d rather not give them another reason to pull me over for going barely above the speed limit.

Fortunately you don’t actually have to drill your front bumper to install the Platypus License Plate Mount by Cravenspeed. The Platypus mounts to the front tow hook, which is located near the corner of the grill on the driver’s side. Although it does introduce a bit of asymmetry to the front-end, I don’t think it looks particularly bad.

In terms of installation, it was super easy. The only difficulty was that I had lost one of the sockets necessary for installation, so I had to pick one up from the hardware store. It took probably less than 10 minutes and looks way cleaner than I expected.

Center console organizer tray - $15

The ND1 center console “glove box” was famously insignificant, due to a CD player unit being mounted underneath. With the removal of the CD player in the ND2, the glove box was upgraded to fill that extra space, making it much more cavernous. Perhaps too cavernous, as it became a chore to dig around in the space looking for your knickknacks.

This introduced another problem though - Autorder Center Console Organizer