Our cars: Mazda 3
Family hatchback’s handling verve is winning us over
I DO a lot of miles in my Mazda 3 fleet car, travelling the length and breadth of the UK to snap pictures for Auto Express magazine and the website. At least, I used to.
As with most readers, for what seems like nearly as long as I can remember, the furthest I’ve been driving is to the shops – which in my case are in Chelmsford city centre, just a few miles down the road from my house. However, the government’s slight easing of the lockdown restrictions recently, permitting longer drives, has allowed me to enjoy the Mazda’s strong suit: just how good the car is to drive.
Beforehand, my day-to-day life with the 3 mostly meant mixing it with motorway traffic while trudging around the M25, rather than quiet B-road blasts. But with traffic still light at the moment, I’ve been taking the scenic route to the beach where I do some exercise and walk my dog,.
I think the Mazda 3 is one of the bestdriving models on sale at any price, full stop. Let’s start with the steering, because for a family hatch it reacts with the kind of sweet precision that some sports cars don’t even offer. You can really feel an engineering link
with Mazda’s MX-5 roadster – and that comes from the chassis, too.
My car is damped really nicely, offering a good degree of comfort. The suspension is not exactly soft, but it absorbs and filters out bumps well. It also gives plenty of support to keep the car flat and stable in corners, serving up a lot of grip. It’s responsive and fun at normal speeds on normal roads, and when it comes to the engineering, you can sense that Mazda’s Skyactiv lightweight philosophy has paid dividends here.
The same technology also extends to the engine, because for the new 3 Mazda added its Skyactiv-X powerplant, along with some sharper styling tweaks and a super-smart overhaul for the interior.
I’ll spare you the full details, but the motor uses clever tech that mimics partly how a diesel engine works, but mostly how a petrol unit works to deliver a little extra torque. However, it revs like you’d want a petrol to, and is more refined than a diesel.
Does it give the best of both worlds then, or is it something of a compromise? To be honest, it feels like a conventional petrol engine all of the time, but it’s nice that
Mazda is pushing forward with tech such as this while sticking with naturally aspirated petrols and not turning to turbos.
The 2.0-litre boasts 178bhp, which is more than enough in this car, even if it does need revving a little harder than I expected. This is no great hardship, though, because working it is made all the more enjoyable by the lovely six-speed manual box the engine is teamed with. Every time our chief reviewer Sean Carson drove the Mazda while using it as a photography tracking car (back when we were allowed to), he mentioned the transmission’s positive feel.
Having not sat behind the wheel for more than five minutes at a time until recently, my brain is not yet used to where everything is laid out on the Mazda’s dash. For that reason, the clarity of the analogue dials was welcome relief when I jumped back into the car for a longer journey. These have a plain black background, smart white markings and a neat, slim needle. Their simplicity makes them lovely design details.
It’s not all good news with the interior, though. With schools currently closed, my children have frequently been coming along for the ride, and their growing size is starting to test the limits of the Mazda’s practicality. My photography gear often used to spill over into the rear seats, but with little need for that right now, it’s been replaced by my girls’ stuff – or the dog on family drives.
Still, I’m holding on to the pluses. Until now I’d never truly experienced how good the Mazda is to drive, so in a way I’m glad this terrible situation has yielded a positive for mine and the Mazda 3’s relationship.