The Grover Wheel

You know what really grinds my gears? When car reviewers will trumpet the virtues of a car’s top-model features and capabilities and then tell you the base price of that car. Case in point? The Mazda 3. “See the excellent stereo and leather trim! Marvel at its powerful engine and 18in wheels!” they say. “And the Mazda 3 starts at just under $17,000!” they say. What do they forget? They are not driving the base $16,945 Mazda 3 sedan. They are zoom-zooming around in the $26,495 s Grand Touring model with every bell and whistle fitted. There’s a $9,500 difference between the base and top trims of the Mazda 3, so how can journalists make an ethical claim to have reviewed the $16,495 Mazda 3 if they have only driven the fancy $26,495 version?

Not me. I refuse to evaluate a car based on the aristocratic top-spec model. Give me the car of the people. The proletariat version. I believe in ethics in automotive journalism, so bring on the base model!

Well, maybe not the base model. Who really buys that one anyway? The base model is for college students and men who wear birkenstocks with tube socks and like to tell you how much they do for the environment when they aren’t helping teach underprivileged puppies to read. No, perhaps the car to review is somewhere in the middle of the range. A few ticks up from the base. That would be the American thing to do. Bring on the middle-class one!

OK, so maybe not the middle-class one. After all, those don’t come with navigation or the upgraded stereo system. I wouldn’t want my readers to get lost or bored. And cloth seats are tough to clean, so at least the fake leather is required if you have a family. And the five-door version is worth the extra money for the extra space. So the right thing to do would be to review the 2015 Mazda 3 s Touring 5-door model. That one is cheaper than the s Grand Touring version, while still packing in almost all the same amenities. And, at $25,095, it’s only $8000 more than the base model! As I said, it’s all about ethics in automotive journalism. Feel free to send me your thanks in the form of cash.

Speaking of cash and ethics, it behoves me to tell you that I was paid for this review. After playing around with their website for several hours, Mazda must have decided that I was a valuable customer (how perceptive of them!) and that I was worth pandering to. So they sent me an invitation to test-drive any of their current range of cars and they would repay me in the form of a $25 Visa gift card. Did I do it for the free money? Of course not! It’s all for you, dear reader. My sacrifice and hard work is all for you. And free money.

So what’s the new Mazda 3 like? In a word: refined. Introduced in 2013 as a 2014 model, the Mazda 3 has shed any last remnants of its bargain-basement  image and emerged as a real luxury contender. Every surface and button in the new 3 feels more expensive than you would expect. The overall package feels very Teutonic and premium. You get the impression as you look around the cabin that Mazda’s engineers were peering over the shoulders of BMW and Audi’s designers so closely that the Germans could feel Japanese breath on their necks. The physical controls for the infotainment system feel copied from Audi and work equally smoothly here as they do in the A3. The screen, a lovely 7-inch unit, is styled and positioned in the middle of the dashboard exactly like it is in any Mercedes. The head’s up display, however, doesn’t feel as premium as it does in BMW’s latest offerings. It rises up to position itself like the display in an F-15 Fighter and frankly feels like a toy. It’s a slightly childish unit in an otherwise completely grown-up cabin.

The leatherette seats fit the upmarket feel of the cabin. They are well-finished and grip the driver comfortably rather than pin them in place like a true performance seat. The heating coils in the seats warm up quickly enough, but I was left wishing for cooling vents to chill my buns back down again. Thankfully, the s Touring has dual-zone climate control so your significant other doesn’t have to fight you for thermal comfort. Nor do they have to sit still and wait for you to change the radio as Mazda has chosen not to slope the touchscreen towards the driver.

Your passenger doesn’t even have to fight you for the keys. As long as you have the key fob somewhere in your pocket, the car will unlock itself and start at the push of a button. That’s nothing really new anymore, but the Mazda does have the added convenience of auto-locking the doors when you walk away from the car. This was a feature lacking on some earlier proximity keys, and it’s a nice touch to make the locks work both ways.

On the move, the Mazda feels solid and planted. The engine is a 184 horsepower Skyactive unit that builds its peak torque quickly to 180 lb/ft at 3250RPM. In sport mode, the transmission holds the engine around 2000RPM so there’s more torque available and less travel in the gas pedal before the car gets up and goes. However, in standard mode the car will drop down to close to idle as you drive through traffic. This results in a slightly slower transition to acceleration when the gas pedal is pushed than one might expect. This might not please the sporting driver, but it will please the housewife looking to waft her way around town. And besides, the sporting driver has a button all for himself anyway.

On the open road the Mazda still remains quiet and dignified. The steering is nicely weighted without feeling difficult at low speeds. The brakes are confident without being bitey, and the engine feels beefy enough if not quite completely linear. Thankfully, the dual-clutch automatic in the Mazda 3 is happy to have you tell it what to do. Push the gear stick to the left to put the transmission in manual mode, and the transmission can be operated with the now-standard layout of paddle shifters or on the gear stick itself. Thankfully, Mazda avoided adding the thumb control third way of operation that it introduced in the NC MX-5 as that setup is overly confusing and redundant. BMW popularized the “slide left and paddle shift” manumatic and it’s nice to see Mazda going back to the classics. The previous generation Mazda 3 had a plastic-festooned shifter that had to be taken down a small maze between gears, and the arrow-straight shift pattern of the new automatic model is now refreshingly upmarket to operate.

Really, upmarket is a good word to sum up the Mazda 3. The exterior styling has been toned down and refined, the interior punches far above its class, and the driving experience feels polished to a shine. In fact, without the Mazda badge to remind you what you’re driving, you might feel that you’re behind the wheel of an entry-level BMW. But at around $25,000, you’re out the door at $7,000 less than any of BMW’s cheapest models. There used to be a time when the Mazda 3 felt like a cheaper copy of a German car. It’s still a cheaper copy today; but it no longer feels like one. And that’s the highest praise any small car can get.

EDIT: I never did get that $25 gift card. So I guess my ethics remain intact and I can claim impartiality.

Photos taken from Mazda USA’s website.