Test Drive: 2010 Mazda3 Sport GS
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VOICE OVER: Miranda Lightstone
It's one of the best selling cars on the road today. Forget Civic Nation, clearly everyone is zoom zooming these days, and it's not hard to see why. The Mazda3 is a well-made, well-priced vehicle that hit the ground running in 2004, and it hasn't looked back. A recent shakeup saw other models in the Mazda lineup radically redesigned, but not the well-loved Mazda3: they chose evolution over revolution for this compact. Sporty, efficient and fun to drive, this car is a winner to http://www.WatchMojo.com, but we still had to do a little zoom zooming of our own before we made our final decision.
Design
The look of the Mazda3 has definitely evolved over the years. The vehicle has gone from subdued to exaggerated and very much in-your-face. With a much more linear look, the shape of the car is accentuated in all the right places. And despite the Mazda3 being an affordable ride, it has a look that makes it seem a bit more pricey.
The Sport version, WatchMojo.com’s tester, has the most modern look of the bunch. The back end is the striking part, and it definitely reminds us of VW’s “Fast” demon featured in commercials years ago for the GTI. Wonder if Mazda did that on purpose?
Of course, the front end has been the talk of the town since the 2010 models were released. Now, our tester was in black so it wasn’t as noticeable, but on any other colour the insane-asylum grin really is a bit off-putting and tends to polarize a lot of people on this car.
Drive
While it’s not the most exciting car on the road, the Mazda3 also isn’t the most boring. New for 2010, Mazda changed their engines ever so slightly giving the Mazda3 a 2.5-liter that pushes out 167 horses and 168 lb-ft of torque. And even though our tester was an automatic, the ride still felt peppy and responsive.
On the GS model, like ours, there is an available Sport shift. Usually, an automatic sport shift system tends to be laggy and a bit unresponsive, but in the Mazda3 it’s pretty much spot on and is as close as you’re going to get to a manual transmission without switching it out.
Mazda has it’s thumb on the pulse of buyers. They have successfully created a line of cars that are fun, fashionable and affordable. With the Mazda2 on the way, it can only go up from here. And really, what’s not to love about zoom zooming?
