Every week, I’m here or hereabouts on these pages, and in our videos, dispensing advice and recommendations about new cars. I guess I ought to be pretty good at it by now - I’ve been at this game since 1997. Yes, I’m that old.
However, I get first-date-style butterflies when it comes to putting my own hand in my own pocket and buying a car myself. It feels like doing the Leaving Cert all over again. Sure, I’ve confidently amassed and passed on knowledge all these years, but now I have to do it for myself, and my family. Muck this up, and I’ll pay for it in more than just cash.
Perhaps this is why I don’t do it very often. The last time we changed our family car was way back in 2012, when we bought a then-three-year-old MINI Clubman Cooper D. From then until just now, that black-and-white compact estate was our family car, seeing us through three house moves, a change of country (depending on your political opinion...), the raising of two boys from pre-school to teenager-hood and the welcoming of a large greyhound into the family.
Through all of that, the MINI coped admirably. No, the odd rear-hinged back door never bothered us. The boot was somewhat small, but with the seats folded down the little Clubman could cope with surprisingly large loads. It was reliable, too - only ever spending a couple of unexpected days off the road in those dozen years of ownership.
By the early part of this year, though, it was clear that the Clubman was on its last legs. The CD player had been broken for ages (one of my sons had successfully wedged five CDs at once into it and it was a dashboard-out job to fix it, so we never bothered and just connected an iPod or iPhone to the aux-in). Some of the aerodynamic shield under the engine had come away, and while it never actually let us down mechanically, it was clear that time was not on its side.
We thought of replacing it with a newer Clubman, the one with four doors which has just gone out of production, but the vibe somehow wasn’t right when we went for a test drive. Something else was needed.
On a whim, we called into Ballyrobert Mazda, just outside Belfast, and chanced our arm for a test drive of an MX-5. A mid-life crisis car? Yes, perhaps, but with one child about to depart for university, it seemed as if we could maybe cope with a less practical car. Sweet though the MX-5 unquestionably is, it too failed under the test-drive scrutiny: it was too firm and not comfortable enough for long journeys visiting relatives around the country.
“What about a Mazda3?” I suggested before we left. I’ve long been a fan of Mazda’s sharp-looking five-door hatch. It’s a fabulously handsome car by any standard but especially by five-door hatchback standards. While a majority of family car buyers have - wrong-headedly, by my reckoning - deserted the five-door hatch market in favour of SUVs (sigh) and crossovers (groan), the arrival of the recently-updated Volkswagen Golf, the enormous Irish sales success of the Skoda Octavia this year, and news that Kia has a smart-suited replacement for the Ceed on the way seems to suggest that there’s still life in this segment.
Of course, the Mazda3 is often seen as an outlier, not least because it only comes with a choice of 2.0-litre petrol engines. There’s no hybrid, which might allow it to compete with the hugely popular Toyota Corolla, and no down-sized turbocharged petrol engine as essayed by most rivals.
That’s because Mazda does things a little differently. The Hiroshima-based car maker reckons that rather than building a small and stressed engine with a turbo in pursuit of lower emissions and better fuel economy, why not make a larger-capacity engine that’s not particularly stressed, and so can run in a more relaxed fashion?
So, the 3 gets a choice of entry-level 2.0-litre SkyActiv-G engine, with 122hp, or the SkyActiv-X, also 2.0 litres, but with 186hp and the clever ability to switch between diesel-like compression ignition and petrol-style spark ignition, all while running on regular unleaded - to reduce emissions and increase efficiency. As a bonus, there’s a mild-hybrid system which gives better stop-start performance around town. Indeed, in the 3 you can have first gear selected and your foot on the clutch with the engine powered-off, as the restart works as you release the brake pedal rather than the clutch, so rapid is the Mazda’s fire-up procedure.
Ballyrobert had one available to test, happily, a black 2022 model, with the 186hp SkyActiv-X engine. So off we went, and it would be fair to say that it was vehicular love at first sight. True, the low-speed ride quality is quite firm, but the comparison between the Mazda and our noisy, hard-riding old MINI was like stepping into a silent hotel room having walked in off a busy city street. The 3’s refinement is excellent, and its mechanical smoothness almost eerie at times.
It is a truly lovely car to drive, too. The light steering doesn’t feel quite so well-connected to the road as that of a Ford Focus, but it’s a vanishingly narrow gap. The 3 has impressive grip and traction, and so corners with a sort of relaxed intensity, flicking through turns with minimal fuss. The engine’s paucity of low-down torque (it deploys merely 240Nm, and that’s produced much higher up the rev counter than most people would these days be used to) seems to be less and less of a problem each time we drive it. Want more grunt? Just drop a gear and rev it a bit harder - after all, 186hp is plenty for a family car. Not so long ago, this would have counted as a hot hatch.
Best of all is its beautifully tactile six-speed manual gearbox. Forgive me if I have a #SaveTheManuals moment, but with my usual test car roster being full of automatics and electric cars, it’s such a relief to get back into the Mazda and remind myself what a pleasurable experience changing your own gears, with such a beautifully tactile mechanism, can be.
Economy? Pretty good actually. So far, the Mazda3 in our hands is returning fuel consumption that’s within about one litre/100km of the MINI’s average figure, which is not bad considering (a) we’ve switched from diesel to petrol and (b) this engine has about 70hp more than the MINI ever did. Even the emissions are low - the Mazda’s 109g/km rating equals that of the MINI, in spite of the greater power output.
The interior is lovely too - built like a bank vault, and with both an infotainment screen and main instruments (a mix of digital and analogue) which are refreshingly simple and exceptionally easy on the eyes at night; something that most other current car makers seem to miss with their increasingly big screens and digital displays. The fact that the infotainment system works off a BMW-style click wheel, rather than a touchscreen, also seems like a blissful improvement on most, if not all, of the cars I’ve been test driving of late.
Should we have gone electric? Possibly, but living in a terraced house, with no option to fit a home charging point scuppered that idea before it ever got going.
We got lucky with our purchase, and I mean genuinely lucky - no-one at Ballyrobert Mazda knew who I was nor what my job is, as my wife took the lead in the purchase, it really being her car. Not only were we treated with courtesy and pleasantness at the dealership, the 3 we bought had just come into stock, off a boat from the UK. It had previously been registered to Mazda UK as a display car, and so in spite of being two years old, had a mere 1,600km on the clock. It is, to all intents, a brand-new car, but bought at a used car price.
So, that’s that question answered. What would a motoring journalist buy with their own money? In this case, a sensible, frugal, practical car, albeit one that - I like to think - displays a bit more flair and artistry than some others, plus Mazda’s ability to design and build a hugely reliable car is not in doubt.
No faults to report thus far (you’d hardly expect any, five months into ownership) but I’ll report back as we go.