Mazda Australia did everything they could to stop us, but we managed to put an order in for a new Mazda 3 to be delivered in April when we get back from New Zealand. I know at least two of you reading this are car nuts, so the full saga is below 🙂 (Oh and the website is still farting around so you may get “page missing” errors on some of the links below.
To get to this point, we had to overcome the fact that the Mazda site refused to give any information regarding specs, prices or release dates until today (the official release date) despite the fact the car has been previewed since July last year, prices have been released to the press (but not to potential customers) about a week ago, and the dealer we decided to use has had the cars in stock ready to order since Wednesday. But no brochures! (In fact you still can’t download one because the file on the site is broken. Well done, Mazda!) I also signed up for updates and entered a competition to win one of the cars – no update email on release day (or at all) and nothing about the competition on the website – you have to go to the Facebook and twitter accounts, neither of which are linked from the website!
So impressed. Not.
The salesperson we dealt with hadn’t actually driven one or been a passenger in one until our test drive on Thursday, and I knew more about the specs and options than she did because of my searching of news articles. Oh and the manager didn’t have the correct information about the new servicing regime, again something released to the press about a week ago, but still not given to the dealerships. I felt really sorry for them 🙁
Anyway, these are the specs for our new Mazda 3 Hatch SP25 with the safety pack. If you want to use the Mazda site to look at the colour we chose, it’s the Blue Reflex here. We’re paying $32,650 for it. A review and a picture gallery here.
We test drove both the 2.0L and the 2.5L and we both agreed the extra power was worth having. Since we had been considering a lower specced 2.0l Subaru Impreza (with less power and worse fuel economy) for $31,062 and a Mazda 6 at $42,548, we’re doing pretty well. We’re getting $8,000 for the trade-in on our 4 year old low mileage Mazda 2 (which is lowballed, I know, but what do you expect?) It runs on 91octane ULP, but will give better fuel economy with Premium ULP.
I deliberately chose an automatic since Doug is not a confident driver and absolutely shocking with gears. Both cars feel as smooth as silk up hills, and the driving experience is gorgeous. Automatic transmissions have certainly improved since I were a gel :). Of course, after driving nothing bigger than a 1.5L Mazda 2 for over ten years, we’re probably easily pleased 🙂 The blindspot monitoring is very good and the dashboard display which has the navigation and so on in it is also easy to use and read. The Heads Up Display on the 2.5l Astina we test drove is nice but I kept forgetting to look at it, and I didn’t figure was worth another $5000, which is the step up to the model above what we’re buying. I’m perfectly happy with a speedometer in the middle of the console thing, where it always has been.
I’m hoping to keep this car around for at least six years. So I hope it’s as sexy to drive as it felt in the test 🙂 Our first real workout will be driving to Adelaide in June. Full report to follow!