You have to love factory tuner cars and the companies willing to sell them. They put their reputation on the line, slapping their badge and warranty on big-winged, look-at-me designs that boast bloated horsepower numbers and raspy exhaust notes. With some automakers, you know you aren’t looking at much more than some fatter wheels wrapped in ultra low-pro rubber and a fake hood scoop, so it’s hard to get excited. But when Mazda gets involved in the factory tuner game – a company where Zoom-Zoom conveniently works both as a catchy marketing riff and a to-the-death engineering mantra – you know good things are just around the corner. Bizarro two-tier semantics aside, Mazda got a lot right with its first shot at the Mazdaspeed3 back in 2007. Wisely then, they aren’t fiddling with the recipe too much. Crammed into the shell of the new 2010 Mazda3 is the same drivetrain as the last Mazdaspeed3, which would be a 263 horsepower turbocharged engine, six-speed manual transmission and a limited-slip front differential. And because Mazda is mindful enough to keep a North American engineering staff on hand to fine tune vehicles for our market, we get the most hardcore version of them all. Front-drive hoons have never had it so good.
Hatchback versatility and turbocharged firepower have long been the norm overseas, and with so few options on this side of the pond it’s nice to see Mazda stick to their guns and only offer the Mazdaspeed3 in five-door form. The options list is about as simplistic as they get, being limited to one line for the tech package.
What’s Not to Like
We didn’t like Mazda’s tiny 4.1-inch MID nav screen the first time around in the 2010 Mazda3, and not surprisingly it hasn’t grown on us since then. Its diminutive size and steering wheel-mounted controls make it too difficult to see, and passengers can’t even use it (unless you don’t mind them clawing at the wheel, that is). The new “smiley” styling of the Mazda3 has proved rather polarizing thus far, and we expect the same learning curve to affect the Mazdaspeed3… Read the full review here!
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