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calendar   Tuesday - May 20, 2014

Driven, Then Driven Away

ZOOM ZOOM? No. But not PUTT PUTT either.

Come Spring, I said over the Winter, I’m getting me a new car. Boy howdy, I want that new Mazda 6. Sexy sexy sexy, and I can get it with a manual.

So today I finally get down to the Mazda dealer and try a few of their cars out. They managed to locate the one Mazda 6 on the lot with a manual transmission, and off we went for a test drive. Wow. My goodness. And never mind.

Coming from a long history of driving tiny little cars, the new generation mid-size Mazda 6 is roomy and smooth riding to us. The clutch is glass smooth, and the transmission shifts gears with all the difficulty of a warm spoon moving through melted butter. Flick, flick, flick, flick. You can barely feel it. This is the nicest manual I’ve ever played with. Gosh. It took me about 1/2 mile to get used to the car, and within a minute it was completely natural. It doesn’t ride or handle like a “big car”; the 6 stays fairly tight and firm, but not too deep into Official Sports Car Land, the way the VW Passats from the mid 2000s did. No, the 6 is comfortable first, sporty second. And it gets great gas mileage. Because it doesn’t have an engine.

No, seriously, it does actually have an engine. But the Mazda 6 is so large, and relatively so heavy, that even the 190hp 4 cylinder engine, which is whisper quiet and very smooth, is barely up to the task. I found myself bouncing the tachometer needle off the rev limited 6000rpm bumper repeatedly. Oh, the car moved along Ok I guess. But I was looking for some of that “Zoom Zoom” the company is based on, and the new Mazda 6 hasn’t got any. It’s a perfectly adequate engine and a well done one, and it helps this good sized car achieve mini-car mpg ratings, and it will be fine for 90% of the driving population looking for a mid-size family hauler that still has a bit of sexy style and some slight pretensions of driving elan.

For now though, I’ll pass. I want more than just slight pretensions of elan. I want medium pretensions. Drop the turbo charged 260hp 2.3 liter in here, or better yet make a practical 2.5 liter turbo tuned to about 300hp and 300 lb/ft of low end torque. Which is exactly what the HO diesel engine gives you, low end torque, but somehow Mazda can’t manage to get it’s little oil burner under the hood and across our borders. And don’t forget the stick. “Zoom zoom” becomes “swish swish” when you swap in the slushbox. Even worse would be killing your entire line by forcing CVTs down every throat, like Nissan is doing. Bad Nissan, bad bad bad. The last iteration of the Mazda 6 had a nice perky little V6 available, which was a much better engine than the lumpy iron boat anchor Ford V6 under the hood in 2003 the last time I took this model out for a drive. Heavier vehicles need more torque, period.

So, the Mazda 6 comes up short on the Goldilocks score of 0-60 times and tire smoking torque.  Short? No, it doesn’t even play that game. No porridge at all. But hey, they’ve got a smaller car, the Mazda 3, that comes with that same engine! And smaller usually means sportier, right, with greater amounts of Zoom Zoom-ery? So you’d think.

I had the salesman bring out a Mazda 3 with the 2.5 liter engine. It’s the same mill as they put in the Mazda 6, and it’s the “big engine” in the 3, the other option being a little 2.0 liter 4 banger. Phooey, I’ve been driving a 2.0 liter 4 banger in my Saturn since 1996. And even though the Mazda engine in this displacement makes 25hp more than my old mill, while pushing a bigger car around faster and getting better mpg ... I want the “zoom zoom”.  So off we go in the Mazda 3, with the 2.5 under the hood.

Funny thing. This iteration of the smaller Mazda was so optioned out that it cost more than the moderately optioned but far larger mid-sized Mazda 6. Both cars can push the price sticker into the upper $20s, very low $30s. Which means that a top end Mazda 3 has more swanky bits and gee-gaws than you can even notice. It was sweet. Black leather everything with red stitching. A backup camera on the rear license plate with ranging lines built in made going in reverse a simple joy. Blind spot monitors somehow can tell if you’ve got an idiot hanging out to either side. The sunroof retracts or slides back into the roof, but there’s still plenty of headroom. Shoulder room is at least 3 inches wider than in my Saturn or her Sentra. The power driver’s seat goes quickly from one adjustment to another, and I think it even has power lumbar adjustment. And of course lights, cup holders, and cubbies everywhere.

And then we come to the navigation / communication / entertainment control center. Actually, I’m not going to go there much, but I will say it took me about 20 seconds, no instructions, to learn that the joystick works almost exactly like the mouse on your PC. Flick it left or right to move across the icon groups, then push it in once to select that group. Within a couple seconds, you’ll be able to stream your own music into the stereo, take a phone call, see what your tire pressure or current MPG is, change from the CD playing to the AM radio, etc. It was dead nutz easy to use. Unfortunately, the display screen is begging you to break it. Seriously. It’s a nice size screen, I’m guessing 7-8”. It’s perched on the top of the dashboard, on it’s thin bottom edge, right over a little dent or niche exactly the same shape and size. It looks for all the world like it’s supposed to fold down, or even retract into a slot. You WANT to push it down, closing the thing like the lid on a cigar box. But it isn’t built that way. It doesn’t move at all.  Somewhere else, above the top of the gauge cluster, is a little plastic rectangle. It’s an HUD speedometer, a Heads Up Display like the gunsight on a fighter jet. It doesn’t seem to adjust either, neither by angle or by brightness. And this is the ONLY speedo ... so if you’re not looking at just the right angle, you can’t tell how fast you’re going. BAD BAD BAD BAD Mazda 3. Take 2 ASBOs and go sit in the corner. ( a well designed instrument cluster with analog gauges will put big solid high contrast needles on the tach and the speedo, so that when you’re busily involved in your own personal “zoom zoom” mode, you can tell your speed and RPM nearly by feel: you can read the gauges without having to look. You can not do this with this joke HUD speedo. Honestly, it’s gimcrackery. The one on my mom’s 1998 Pontiac reflects onto the back of the windshield, and is location and brightness adjustable. So this is not even close to new tech. It’s nearly 20 year old tech, so it’s utterly inexcusable to get it wrong here in the 2nd decade of the 21st Century.

Yeah, but what about driving the damn thing Drewwww?? Alright, fine. The new Mazda 3 with the 2.5 engine rides smooth, corners with amazing flatness, seems to be glued to the road even though it has a much higher center of gravity than the smaller cars we’re driving ... and that 190hp engine provides almost all the motive power and torque any normal person will ever use. It goes just fine, thank you very much. It goes pretty damn good actually. Another 25hp and it would actually be fast. And that’s with the automatic transmission, which not only has a manual shift mode, it also has a “sport mode” button, which does something. Not sure what, but it does something. And ... but ... you CAN’T get a manual transmission in the Mazda 3 with the 2.5 engine. Not. For. Sale. W.T.F.??? Seriously, it simply isn’t available. The 2012 had it, the current Mazda 6 has it, it’s a wonderful combination ... and YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE.

Real bottom line: if you want “ZOOM ZOOM” in the new Mazda 3 look elsewhere, or wait for the HO diesel or the Mazdaspeed turbo to arrive ... some year. If you want “Zoom Zoom” you’re SOL. The automatic is really nice, very tight, and shifts on command, but it’s still a hydraulic pump. The best it will give you is “Zoom zoom”. The manual transmission in the Mazda 3 with the smaller engine, or any engine/transmission combination at all in the Mazda 6 won’t even get you “zoom zoom”. 

Mazda has built themselves two sexy, beautiful, snappy handling cars (oh, did I mention that both models have awesome brakes and seem to stop on half a dime?), both with a smooth ride, plenty of space, nifty options, a sense of being very well made ... and pretty small balls. The Mazda 3 needs 200hp and a manual trans, the Mazda 6 needs 250 and any trans. That would make them worthy of the “Zoom Zoom” slogan the company built it’s name on. If either car was equipped with a manual and the HO diesel, both would become racing tanks. TOOORQUE! shift, TOOOORQUE! shift, TOOORQUE! shift, etc. Imagine that: two sports cars where you don’t want the gas engines. Alas, that engine isn’t coming here this year, in any Mazda vehicle.

Most people will never notice the lack of power, because most people are garden slugs, especially behind the wheel. They wouldn’t know what a fun driving experience was if you told them. The ones with money buy BMWs with 300+hp engines (and automatic transmissions), then drive around at 10 under all the time. The ones with less money probably don’t buy cars at all, sporty or not. SUVs and mommyvans, and that suits them just fine.

But I want to enjoy driving, and I don’t have the cash to buy a BMW or an Audi.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 05/20/2014 at 08:27 PM   
Filed Under: • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
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