Road Test
Mazda 2 1.5 Sport
Test date 26 September 2007
Price as tested £11,899
For Agile chassis, attractive styling, usable performance
AgainstPoor touring refinement, wet-weather grip and braking, interior finish
Modern superminis are hugely competent cars. Refined in a way unimaginable as little as five years ago, and more spacious than you’d credit, the best on the market today are eminently viable as 15,000-mile-a-year cruisers.
What they aren’t, however, is as compact or as enjoyable-to-drive as they used to be. In becoming more refined, safer and spacious, they’ve become more bloated than ever. A lot more. The four-metre plus, 1200kg supermini is now all too common.
It has to stop. You can cram as much engine technology as you like into a car, but if it’s overweight, you won’t change its carbon emissions as much as you will by losing 200kg.
If reducing carbon emissions is going to replace passive safety as the driving force of car design during the next few years, new cars are going to get lighter. Which is good news for enthusiasts like of us: less weight, typically, means more driving enjoyment.
The first example of what we hope and expect to be a new breed of lighter small car is represented by this Mazda 2. The basis for next year’s Ford Fiesta and 100kg lighter than even its predecessor, it’s the first sign of something significant in small cars. Question is, is it any good?
Mazda has long made small cars but not until its renaming policy at the start of this century were any called the 2. Before that was a badge-engineered Fiesta called the 121, then the rather forgettable Demio. The first 2 – also based on the Fiesta platform, but more similar to Ford’s Fusion in its execution – never really hit the mark in the UK, although did sell well in Japan (still badged Demio). But the 2 is a more conventional supermini this time round in it’s positioning at least, if not its engineering.
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