Category: Small Family 
Price Range: £11,430 to £17,930
Taut, responsive handling, lively engines, nicely built out of well-fitting components, improved refinement from summer 2006.
Slightly overworked styling, not as roomy as it looks, still doesn't look that inspiring or sporty.
More fun to drive than you'd expect, but not quite an object of desire.
The Mazda 3 has not been too familiar a sight in the UK, but since its launch in autumn 2003, Mazda has sold over 222,000 examples of its small family-sized car in Europe and a million or so worldwide.
A Hiroshima-built sister model to the latest Ford Focus - which it pre-dated - and also sharing much of its underpinnings with the Volvo S40 and V50, it's the first of this 'family' of Ford-empire models to receive an update and general overhaul. This hasn't been exactly extensive, but even if the minor tweaks are less than headline-worthy, checking out these latest models does at least serve to remind that the often-overlooked 3 was never a bad car in the first place.
Much more eye-catching than the anonymous 323 it replaced, the 3 was styled in Japan and, though specifically developed to suit European tastes, it has a very distinctly Japanese look to it, as well as a more grown-up image than the seen-everywhere, mass-market Focus.
It comes in five-door hatchback and four-door saloon form, and engines to choose from are a Ford-sourced 1.4 petrol (84bhp), the Ford-PSA 1.6-litre diesel (in both 90bhp and 109bhp formats) and Mazda's own 1.6 (105bhp) and 2.0-litre petrol (150bhp) units. And (from early 2007) there's also the 260bhp Mazda 3 MPS, featuring Mazda's own 2.3-litre, direct-injection turbo engine, and pumping out more power than the Volvo-engined Ford Focus ST.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Mazda Mazda3
wrote on 16 12 2006