The two thousand seventeen Mazda3 5-Door Grand Touring Review: The Compact Car, Ideally Executed
Welcome to Critic’s Notebook, a quick and off-the-cuff car review consisting of impressions, jottings, and marginalia regarding whatever The Drive writers happen to be driving. Today’s edition: The two thousand seventeen Mazda3 5-Door Grand Touring.
The Mazda3 has been one of the under-appreciated heroes of the family car world for fairly a while now. It’s the most entertaining option in a class packed with entrants ranging from the exceptional (Honda Civic, Subaru Impreza) to the mediocre (Toyota Corolla, Ford Concentrate) and even the craptastic (Dodge Dart, non-Evo versions of the Mitsubishi Lancer). Even the crummiest Mazda3 I’ve ever driven—an automatic-equipped base model rental car—was anything but crummy. (Figuratively speaking, at least. It did have fairly a few actual crumbs in it.) That car knocked out a 13-hour impromptu road tour from Kentucky to Manhattan in style, proving itself as relaxed on the long, speedy flatlands of Pennsylvania as it was entertaining on the winding country roads of West Virginia.
Climb up to the Grand Touring model that I tested more recently, tho’, and you’ve got about as nice a car as can be had for under $28,000. Standard features includes items like leather upholstery, heated seats, a nine-speaker Bose stereo, and a head-up display. Granted, it’s not as fancy as the HUDs found in luxury cars; it projects onto a translucent pop-up panel on the dashboard spandex hood, not the windshield . but that just makes it less prone to washout. Plus, it looks like something out of an F-104 Starfighter, which is cool. The seats proved themselves over almost 1,000 miles of driving in a long weekend. Never once did my gams, back, or cheeks complain, even after eight hours behind the wheel. Adding on the i-Active Safety Package found on my tester also brings the type of advanced active safety features like radar cruise control, lane departure warning and lane keep assist, and traffic sign recognition (in case you miss a speed limit sign because you’re having too much joy rowing the slick six-speed manual through the gears) that most people still don’t associate with inexpensive compacts.
But something tells me Mazda doesn’t indeed care if the three never comes close to the sales volume of Civic and Corolla. Obviously, it’s looking to sell slew of cars, but it’s a petite, independent automaker; it knows it’s never going to challenge on volume with a company whose market cap dwarfs the GDP of Kazakhstan. Like Subaru, its fellow go-it-alone Japanese carmaker, Mazda seems glad to sell cars that dance to their own rhythm and made for people who do the same. For Subaru, that manifests primarily through all-wheel-drive; for Mazda, it’s about making ones that are joy to drive.