2009
Mazda 6
Grey
Cloth Interior
5000 miles
Automatic slushbox
Here are my impressions of this car;
First off this car is nice, but very soft. I can not get comfortable in it, I cant adjust the seat and steering wheel to actually feel good at the wheel. And let me tell you, automatics suck, they really, truly completely suck. This car has the old steptronic "put it in a gear manually and 'shift' nonsense", which kind of helps, but here are my problems with it (or at least my findings);
1. It will stay in gear when you manually choose that gear and ride the rev limiter, which would be good, but really isnt because you cant hear the motor at all, so you have no idea whats going on until you look down and see the tach at redline. It doesnt bounce off the limiter, but just sits there riding it.
2. If you manuallly choose a gear, and are at say 3500 and you punch it, you want to floor it in that gear, not necesarilly downshift, and THEN punch it. Which is what happens.
2a. So you are going through a light, in 3rd gear that you manually chose, and you punch it to get through quickly, instead of just leaving it in 3rd and increasing the gas/air into the motor it does this;
PAUSE------PAUSE-------DOWNSHIFT INTO 2nd-----THEN GO
Which is much damn slower then jus increasing your speed a tad in 3rd gear, its not like 3500rpms is that taxing on the motor or anything.
3. The throttle is overboosted, meaning that the first 2 inches of the throttle are quite hard to modulate, its hard to take off from a stop without the car 'rushing' to get off the line. It makes the car feel fast, but they need to make the throttle pedal more linear.
4. The brakes are as touchy as any brakes I have ever used, it makes me feel like I am bad driver, I can not smoothly and lightly apply the brakes. Its kind of an all on or all off sort of deal. Weird coming from a Mazda.
5. Its handling is .... well what you would expect from a mid grade mid sized crappily tired family sedan. I would say from my limited driving it is marginally better than a Monte Carlo, but only marginally so. It does NOT bestow confidence. i.e. when I take a few turns going to my work in even a Honda Accord or Civic the car feels planted and while it has lots of body roll still begs me to feed on the throttle. This Mazda 6 feels wet loose and just floaty, and I am somewhat scared to feed on the right foot, since the car is so wallowy. A fun track car this would not be, at all.
6. Fit and finish are nice. Its decent quality, somewhere between a Mercedes and a Ford. Its solid, and looks 'nice'.
7. The placement of things is a total mystery to me. I am not short, or do I have short arms, and it is damn hard to reach half of the controls on th radio. The door lock and door handle are so far foward in the door it is actually awkward to lock the doors, so much so that I find myself not doing it, and I ALWAYS lock car doors when I am driving.
8. It has a 1/8" mini AUX input, which every single car in the world should come with, this is one of the first cars I have driven where I get to h0ok up my iphone, its nice. It also can read MP3 and WMA disks, but really who cares in this day and age. The Audi SD card slot for MP3s is way more slick if you ask me.
9. Lastly, something is weirdish with the windshield. The angle of the windshield or just the curvature of it makes my vision look a bit weird. When I am loking straight ahead things are just the slightest bit off, maybe its an interaction between my glasses and the windshield, but it would be enough to bother me if I owned this car.
So in a nutshell, this car is OK, but pretty lackluster and pretyt unmoving. I think I would rather have the Toyota/Honda/Nissan offering in ths same class if push came to shove, but I am sure they are slightly more money.
The REAL sad part about this rental car is that I was on the verge of renting a Porsche Cayman for the 2 days, but they didnt have one available. It woudl have been a waste of $300 considering my pretty boring ass commute, but at leats I would have been in a very cool car that I have never driven before (even if it was the wimpy non-S version and had the "I am a complete lame-ass" automatic tranny).
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