Mazda CX-3: car review

Mazda CX-3: car review

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This article titled "Mazda CX-3: car review" was written by Martin Love, for The Observer on Sunday 15th November 2015 06.00 UTC

Price: £17,595
Top speed: 124mph
0-62mph: 8.7 seconds
MPG: up to 70.6
CO2 emissions: 105g/km2

They say being a parent is all about letting go, and last month we did just that. More than let go, in fact, we gave our boy a great long shove up the M1 – and off into a world of his own. Taking him to university isn’t exactly chucking him naked into a loveless void, but that’s what it felt like to us. “Out you get, sonny, you’re on your own now.” But there were upsides to abandoning him in Edinburgh. One was that it gave me 900 miles and 21 hours at the wheel to really get inside the skin of this all-new Mazda CX-3. Another was that when coming home we followed the winding A701 for miles as it snakes alongside the River Tweed to Moffat – the soft rain, purple heather and scree-scarred slopes a perfect backdrop to our melancholic mood.

The Mazda CX-3 is a compact crossover – which sounds like a miniature mongrel, but is in fact the fastest-growing class of car in Britain. And it’s easy to see why people like it. Neat, nimble and capable, yet with a big-car presence, it has the driving position and comfort of a much larger SUV. We jammed three adults and an entire year’s worth of student clobber into it. You’d have been astounded how much we got in. I can’t say it wasn’t a squeeze. It was like a game of sardines and when I opened the boot at the other end I thought duvets, laptops and toastie machines would jump out like a jack in the box.

And then there’s the drive. Despite the added weight, the car is a real performer. Buyers have a choice of two engines: one petrol and one diesel. I drove the 2-litre petrol version, which in two-wheel mode produces 118bhp. This was more than ample: it was smooth and responsive and was as happy negotiating narrow inner-city roads as it was blasting the length of the country. There is a more powerful 148bhp model, but that comes only as a four-wheel drive which reduces the remarkable economy: over 900 miles I averaged almost 50mpg – real-world data.

In order to showcase the CX-3’s many talents – its agility, its strength and its endurance – Mazda has produced four short films in which they enter the vehicle in a series of car v dog races. There’s the start torque of the greyhound, the agility of the collie, the power of the mastiff and the reliability of the Labrador. The Mazda wins hands down in every race and I’m not sure it proves anything other than how fun it is to watch dogs doing things in ultra slo-mo. However, I do object to one thing: does my Dalmatian not have any qualities that a car would need?

Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter at @MartinLove166

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