Overview

The Mazda 3 is sporty, roomy and fun. It's available as a neatly styled four-door sedan or as a more adventurous looking five-door hatchback. The sedan has a sweet, rounded shape and smooth, cohesive design. The five-door looks more aggressive, but a lot of utility with its hatchback design and folding rear seats.

Quick, nimble handling makes the Mazda 3 (or Mazda3 as the company renders it) fun to drive on twisty country roads. The free-revving 2.3-liter engine delivers spirited performance. The five-speed manual transmission shifts beautifully, and there's an interesting automatic available with a manual-shift feature.

Model Lineup

The four-door sedan is available with a choice of 2.0-liter or 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine. The five-door hatchback comes only with the 2.3-liter engine.

The Mazda3i four-door sedan comes with the 2.0-liter engine ($13,680). Standard equipment includes AM/FM/CD, tilt and telescope steering wheel with audio controls, 15-inch steel wheels, halogen headlights, a stainless steel exhaust system, wind-up windows and manual door locks. A five-speed manual gearbox is standard, an automatic transmission ($900) is optional. Air conditioning is optional ($850). Also optional: power windows, mirrors and door locks, cruise control, remote entry, an upgraded driver's seat, upgraded audio with six speakers, and 16-inch alloy wheels, available as a package ($1,400).

Two-stage frontal airbags are standard. We strongly recommend the safety package ($800), which includes side-impact airbags for the front seats, side air curtains for head protection for front and rear-seat passengers, and anti-lock brakes (ABS) with electronic brake-force distribution (EBD). That would make a well-equipped (and commonly equipped) Mazda3i more like $17,275 (with the $545 destination charge), or $18,175 with the automatic.

The Mazda3s is more powerful and better equipped. Available in the four-door ($16,615) and five-door ($17,105) styles, the 3s comes standard with all the power conveniences plus air conditioning, cruise control, an upgraded stereo and foglights. The five-door hatchback gets sporty 205/50 all-season radials on 17-inch steel wheels.

Options for the 3s include the automatic transmission ($900), the safety package with side-impact airbags, curtain airbags, ABS and EBD ($800); leather upholstery ($590); xenon high-intensity discharge headlights with a tire-pressure monitoring system ($700); and a navigation system ($1,750). A Sport Package ($490) combining 17-inch wheels with sill extensions is available for the 3s sedan.

A package combining a moonroof with a six-disc CD changer ($890) is available on all Mazda3 models. Sirius Satellite Radio ($399) can be dealer-installed in any Mazda3, though there's also a labor charge.

The Mazda3i is available at no charge as a Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle (PZEV) that trades four horsepower (down to 144 horsepower) for significant reductions in emissions.

Walkaround

Whether four-door sedan or five-door hatchback, the Mazda3 is a wonderful car to walk around. The four-door and the five-door share no body panels. This represents what Mazda is known for: innovation and the risk that comes with it. When you look at the two cars, you can see that the styling of each nose would only work with its own tail. Grafting a hatchback onto the nubile nose of the four-door would never do. The five-door needed an edgy proboscis, which it got. It's uncommon for a manufacturer to go to the extra expense of tooling more panels than absolutely necessary for a second body style, but Mazda had a high styling standard for this car.

The four-door sedan has a sweet rounded shape forward of the A-pillar. Mazda's trademark wedge grille has horizontal bars on the 3s, plain black mesh on the 3i. The headlamps have a smooth and sexy shape, swept back like cat's eyes and sparkling with three beams inside. The whole front bumper, including the air dam at the bottom with foglights in the corners, is impressively integrated. There's a small seam on each fender between the headlights and the wheel opening, and between the headlights there's only the hood crack. Everything south of that is one smooth and effective piece.

The rear of the sedan is another smooth cohesive design with an integrated bumper, and again only small seams at the edges. The deck is short and high and nicely softened at the top. At all four corners, the wheelwells fit tightly around the tires; there used to be a rule at Mazda that there had to be enough of a wheelwell gap to install tire chains without removing the tire, which the stylists hated and finally defeated with the Mazda3.

The five-door hatchback is no wider, but it appears wide-shouldered because of the aggressive nose; the fenders are dropped and sculpted to rise to the hood and flow into the front doors. The boxy top half makes the whole car look wider. There's less rake from the tops of the doors to the roof (affording more shoulder room), but the rear of the roof is gently rounded to the liftgate window, to soften the profile. There's a tidy spoiler above the rear window.