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Mazda Tribute a Blast from the Past Mazda's Tribute small SUV is one case in which the manufacturer's famous "zoom zoom" slogan doesn't quite apply. It's probably because the vehicle is a victim of time – it's from an era now past. more.... Mazda's little bundle of joy was reborn about a year ago, moving beyond the loveable and classic Miata with a new look, new power, and a new, shorter name: just plain MX-5. At heart, it's still the joyful little Miata, and now, with the addition of an optional power-operated retractable hard top, it's even better. more.... Mazda CX-7 Hauls People, Stuff, Butt Minivans are out, at least if you're Mazda, and that may not be too bad a thing. more.... Big Mazda "Crossover" SUV - "Zoom" with a Bird's Eye View It's big, it's comfy and it's roomy. Oh yeah, it's also a Mazda and that means it's pretty nice to drive. Mazdas 3 - a Zoomy Sedan and a ZOOMY! Wagon No matter what flavor you choose for it, Mazda's 3 is a slick little car that offers a lot of fun wrapped up in a lot of practicality. The 3, nee Protégé, is available in three flavors: four door sedan, five door sports wagon (the Mazda3 Sport) and the Mazdaspeed3, the really hot version of the wagon. Mazda claims on its website that the 3 is a combination of "exhilarating driving performance, emotional styling and high levels of craftsmanship". more.... Mazda MX-5 - Talkin' 'bout Regeneration Once it was called the Miata, and it turned the automotive
world on its ear. The little two seat roadster took all that
had been great about open top motoring as personified by
the classic British sports cars and added new technology
and the legendary dependability of Japanese cars. It was
an instant hit and has continued to be a wonderful and popular
fun-mobile ever since then. Mazdaspeed 6 – Family Sedan or Road Rocket? Take one of the best looking four door sedans on the market, add a turbocharger and a bunch of other tweaks and what do you have? Very nearly driving heaven, if sporty performance is the Holy Grail for which you’re searching. So it is with the Mazdaspeed 6, the hottest version of Mazda’s terrific mid-sized sedan. Like the Mazdaspeed Miata I drove last summer, the hopped up Mazda 6 loves to perform – and this time it does it without forcing you to leave the kids and the luggage back home. more... Mazda 5: A People and Stuff Mover with “Zoom-Zoom” Mazda’s new six seater looks like a mini-minivan (a microvan?), but Mazda prefers to call it “the Zoom-Zoom MAV.” MAV is yet another in a long series of acronyms or nicknames companies use, perhaps to avoid the “soccer mom” image minivans and other utility vehicles have gotten over the years. Thus we have “sports tourers” such as Mercedes R class, “CUV” Crossover Utility Vehicles such as the Subaru B9 Tribeca, “CSV” Crossover Sport Vans such as the Saturn Relay, “SAV” Sports Activity Vehicles such as BMW’s X5. Next maybe we’ll get “PASH-V’s – People And Stuff Hauling Vehicles. more... Turbocharger Widens the Smiles as Miata eats up the Miles Well, is my face red. For a happy reason: a week spent under the hot summer sun behind the wheel of Mazda’s turbocharged Mazdaspeed MX-5 Miata. I spent so much time roaring around the back roads with the roof down that I ended up being broiled medium well, which for a guy who doesn’t go outdoors except to drive cars, is quite something. And, other than the sunburn, I loved every minute of it! The Mazdaspeed Miata takes everything that makes the basic Miata wonderful and ups the ante to move the little critter from being a great fun car to being a great and fast fun car. more... Well, they certainly aren’t kidding. I mean, Mazda’s “zoom zoom” slogan can be applied in the real world to the experience of driving such fun cars as the Miata and even the 6 sedan. But take it to its ultimate expression and you have to be talking about the RX-8, the latest generation of the company’s rotary-powered sports cars and an absolute blast to take out on the highway. The gorgeous RX-8 follows on the heels of the popular RX-7, but ups the ante over that great car in several ways. First, it features a new generation of the rotary engine, which Mazda calls “RENESIS.” This power plant is nothing short of remarkable: in my top-of-the-line test RX-8, Mazda manages to get 238 horses and 164 lb.-ft. of torque from an engine comparable to 1.3 litres! Incredible – and don’t let those power/torque specs fool you; they may not be as high as some of the competition, but this car is no slouch by any means. more... Can a station wagon be cool? Can it be sporty? You bet! The days of a station wagon being a stodgy family hauler are long gone and some of today’s wagons are wonderful blends of function with form. Take the Mazda 6 Sport Wagon, for example. The Mazda 6 has been winning awards ever since it was introduced for the 2004 model year, and the new wagon version copped the 2005 AJAC (Automobile Journalists Association of Canada) Car of the Year Award for “Best New Station Wagon”. I can see why. The 6 Sport Wagon is a blast to drive – and you can haul stuff with it, too! For what more could anyone ask? Well, possibly a manual transmission for those who don’t want to be accused of being shiftless – but even there Mazda has thrown “purists” a very nice bone in the form of a terrific 6 speed automatic with a pretend manual mode that’s almost as good as an honest to goodness manual tranny with a clutch. Almost. more... In a market segment that features such venerable Japanese entries as the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, carving out a market share is going to require more than just a great car. It has to be a great car that's different from its direct competition. And that’s what Mazda has done with its terrific 6 four door sedan. It goes head to head with Accord and Camry (and others, of course), but whereas those other two models are refined and fully featured and all-round excellent, the 6 also adds its own substantial measure of “fun to drive” to the mix. And that makes a big difference. more... Mazda's "cute ute" Tribute is a nice small SUV with good performance both on and off the road, plenty of features, and good value overall. I first had a chance to drive the Tribute when it debuted, at a media event where they sent us out off roading up a "road" I probably wouldn't have even tried walking up if given my druthers. That experience showed me that the Tribute is truly happy to perform off road as on city streets. Most people don't do serious off roading in their SUV's however, so my recent week with the 2005 Tribute was spent on asphalt, in urban and rural driving that would probably match most of what the Tribute would experience in the real world. And it reinforced my earlier opinion that the Tribute is a good SUV. more... Entry Level Mazda Still a “Zoom Zoomy” ride The Mazda Protegé is far more fun to drive than it has any right to be. After all, it’s Mazda’s entry level vehicle, a supposed econobox that competes with the likes of the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, Hyundai Accent and the rest. Yet when you get behind the wheel and take off, even if the car’s handicapped by an automatic transmission as my tester was, you find yourself having a really good time driving the thing. Go figure. Actually, this is exactly what Mazda wants you to discover about the car. The first page inside its brochure for the Protegé reminds you, however ungrammatically, that “fun” is both a noun and a verb, and that it’s time to put your foot down. more... A Shiftless Existence in a Protegé 5 Mazda's Protegé 5 is a definite success story. After having driven a bumblebee-colored sample when the car was brand new on the market, I was very impressed and figured the car would sell boatloads. And it has; it's hard to drive very far near where we live without seeing multiple examples of the little wagons “zoom zooming” around. And deservedly so; Protegé 5 is a nice car. For those who may not have yet experienced such sightings, the Mazda Protegé 5 is the attractive five door hatchback/station wagon that appears to have spawned (or at least beaten to market) a host of imitators including the Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe and Suzuki Aerio. It's probably the most subtle and attractive of them all, styling-wise, and that isn't a bad thing – though beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. more... The brand new 2002 Protegé 5 is a cute five door hatchback/station wagon that appears to be aimed at the youth market. How do I know? Well, the bright "vivid yellow" model I drove, which came complete with black racing stripes running its length (giving the overall impression of a giant bumblebee), pulled in more stares per mile than any vehicle I've driven recently, and most of the admiring gazes came from teen and twentysomething females. So if you want to be a real babe magnet, this may be your car, but I felt like a mid-life crisis guy trying to look cool. It was quite embarrassing… The bright yellow would also be a magnet for traffic cops, especially if you drive the Protegé 5 with any kind of elan. more... Mazda’s First Sport Ute a Legitimate “Mazda-piece” Mazda’s first time at bat in the SUV market has resulted in a home run. The Tribute feels as at home on the mountainside as on the city streets. I know this because, while the weather (and my nerves) didn’t allow for any off-roading during my week and a half with the 2001 Tribute ES, I had the opportunity to go four wheeling in one at a media junket last fall. At that event, we were given a mountainside – you can’t call it a road – on which to test the Tribute’s mettle. To make a long and humiliating story short, I chickened out long before the Mazda did; in fact, the Tribute never lost a beat as it handled the mud, gravel, boulders, and inclines of what turned out to be a real torture test. more... Mazda Miata - Going Topless with a Fair-weather Friend Any car that's this much fun must somehow be bad. But Mazda's MX-5 Miata sure feels good! The Miata has been around for over a decade, and has almost single-handedly re-carved the niche made famous by those honored British sports cars of decades past. Except the Miata has the advantage that it not only gets you where you're going, IT GETS YOU BACK AGAIN! What a concept! I've owned three MGB's and loved them very much, though since I'm not mechanically minded I ended up on the side of the road with a dead "B" so many times that I finally gave up on such junk. My last "B," bought brand new, was by far the worst and turned me off British cars for years. I've never owned a Miata, unfortunately, because when it was introduced the kids had come along and the Miata wasn't practical for our lives. more... New Millennia for the New Millennium - Luxury Sedan Top of the Line Mazda’s newly-styled 2001 Millennia is a comfortable luxury sedan that offers a lot for the price. I first drove the Millennia for about half an hour at a media junket, and I liked it. I had it for a week this time, which gave me a much better feel for the vehicle. It's the first of three Mazdas I'll be driving over the next few weeks and, from my experience with the Millennia, it should be a treat. The handsome and stylish Millennia S (my tester was a lovely metallic red with a beige/gray leather interior) is powered by a 210 horsepower, 2.3 liter, 24 valve DOHC V6 that uses “Miller Cycle” technology. The base model Millennia has a more conventional, 2.5 liter V6. Patented in the 1940’s, the Miller Cycle is said to give the power of a 3 liter V6 with the fuel economy of a 2 liter. It uses a Supercharger (which forces extra air into the engine) and compresses the air inside the cylinders differently. The result is said to be a 15 per cent increase in power. I can't attest to the fuel mileage (I tend to have a heavy foot) but the power’s certainly there. It's smooth, too, coming on quickly and evenly; from a standing start I'd be at 50 m.p.h. before I knew it. This was embarrassing in playground zones… more... Mazda Minivan a Comfy People Mover - 2001 Model Pleasant and Powerful The minivan market is nothing if not crowded, so it pays for a marque to offer something unique if it wants to make its mark. Fortunately for Mazda, it has never been reluctant to tread its own path, as witnessed by its embrace of such non-mainstream stuff as (for example) the rotary and Miller engines. The 2001 MPV is a fairly straightforward example of the minivan species, but it boasts a few things that set itself apart from the pack. Add them all together and you end up with a thoughtful and comfortable family vehicle. more... Mazda Pays Tribute to Sport Utes - 2001 Model Line Intros SUV Mazda has finally jumped into the SUV market. The Japanese carmaker’s first Sport Ute is the 2001 Tribute and, judging from the test drives in which I participated, it’s a fine unit that’s surprisingly apt off road. A Mazda media junket to Vancouver, British Columbia, to premiere its 2001 model year lineup was my first opportunity to see the Tribute up close, and I was quite impressed. Tribute is a “cute ute,” a small SUV in the vein of Toyota’s RAV4. It comes in two basic configurations: a four banger, 5 speed manual and a V6 with a four speed automatic. Both offer front and four wheel drive, though 4WD is optional on the entry level DX. more...
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