Mazda2 1.3 TS Five-Door review
by Mike Grundon (7 November 2007)
It was an incongruous moment. In the foreground an autumnal afternoon sun was imbuing the Sutherland moor with a luminous golden light, right down to a turquoise North Atlantic bay, roughed up by a stiff onshore breeze. Further up the valley to landward, the light was completely different – silver shafts burst from leaden skies, picking out the charcoal and platinum crags of the escarpment.
It was incongruous because of the place I was viewing it from. I was gazing out on this grand and natural majesty from the driving seat, not of a Defender, Land Cruiser or Shogun, but of the diminutive Mazda2, a vehicle described as a city car.
Hundreds of miles from the nearest city of substance, we were out of the car's natural environment but not out of its depth. It was as inappropriate an appearance in this scene of elemental Highland drama as Tom and Jerry turning up in Lord of the Rings, but the little car was showing no sign of fear.
My test vehicle was the middle-output petrol version of Mazda's smallest car with a 1.3-litre petrol unit working through a five-speed manual gearbox to the front wheels. It turned out 85bhp – more than its 74bhp 1.3-litre sister and less than the 1.5 with 102bhp.
It glittered in a cartoon shade known to the company as Spirited Green Metallic which is meant to be so desirable it costs an extra £350 on top of the standard price. For a short while I'd been driving along behind a Citroen Saxo in Sunburst Orange - it felt like we'd fallen from a packet of lime and mandarin Tic Tacs. I'm not sure which of the nine available colours is the most appealing on the Mazda2 but I'm pretty sure this isn't it.
Colour aside, the little five-door hatchback had some nice, clean lines to it. At first sight in the car park at Inverness airport, it was clearly a baby sister to the Mazda3, sharing the same design theme but nicely adapting it to keep in proportion.
Narrow lights at the front and back, a bullet nose rising up into a long, raked windscreen and a nice upswept crease from the heel of the front wheel to the top of the rear, all worked well to create the impression of a well-balanced little car. I particularly liked the way the fold over the front wheelarch was sharp and accentuated, making it look more muscular than it really was.
The lack of power is a big issue when you take the little car out into the wild. The 85bhp and 90lb/ft of are fine for tooling around town but it demands a bit of stick stirring when the high road wends skyward. It weighs less than a tonne but even on the flat it'll take almost 13 seconds to reach 62mph. That stick shift is also a bit heavy for such a small car, but it is conveniently close to your left hand, protruding as it does from a blister on the centre console.
There was a lot of fun to be had among the heather. Ducking and weaving along the valley bottoms showed the 2 is every bit as taut as its bigger siblings. If you can avoid yourself rocking in your seat trying to gee it up a bit and adopt a more relaxed approach to enjoying the scenery, it'll do all you want of it.
This mid-level TS2 specced version is expected to be the most popular model. In the front there were such pleasant additions as steering wheel mounted controls for the MP3/CD/radio sound system, leather steering wheel and gearknob, and the reassuring presence of front and side airbags. Space was a bit limited though - with the driver's seat as far back as it would go, I could still happily press the clutch to the floor. A lankier lad would have his style cramped.
In the back there was, surprisingly, enough room for me to sit upright. Okay, my knees were on the driver's seat and my head just brushing the roof, but remember the class this car is in. The boot is rather narrow to get into and not very big, but the back seats are split asymmetrically and fold forwards to extend it when needed. The seats however, don't fold flat.
Build quality seemed good, as you'd expect from a modern Mazda, but the driver's seat creaked annoyingly and I know mine isn't the only car this happened on.
Town driving shows how nippy and manoeuvrable the little car is, but when you start reversing into parking slots you'll soon find that the huge rear pillars cut from view rather a lot of space where bollards, bikes and bumpers could be lurking.
The joy, however, comes from the fuel economy. The 1.3 has an official average consumption of 52.3mpg which, combined with its 9.4-gallon tank, means I could have theoretically driven from Inverness almost to Cambridge before having to fill up. For those of you not familiar with the country, that's almost 500 miles – the distance from Penzance to Newcastle.
The new Mazda2 is a much better-looking car than the outgoing model. It's got a fractionally bigger engine than the last base model which is more powerful and yet much more economical and significantly cleaner. It's physically smaller and lighter than the old car and yet slightly more expensive, but it's a lot more desirable and that's why its many competitors in this packed and keenly fought-over sector of the car market will be watching its progress with extreme interest.
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