Adventure Reviews

It’s certainly an impressive achievement, especially when you find out the other star-festooned car is four times the price of the Impreza.But Subaru thinks this safety aspect is a feature they can use to market the little hatchback to mature professional women, because that woman 'cares about what happens to a pedestrian if she hits one’.That’s a boot-load of absolute nonsense, of course.Mature professional women don’t give a hoot what happens pedestrians. You only have to look at any shopping centre, office car park or early morning school drop-off zone to see that.Are those places full of sleek little hatches with lots of gold safety stars?No, they’re not. If there are any little hatches there, they are cowering out of sight among the army of monster offroaders purchased specifically for their ability to crush any obstacle — human or mechanical — that gets in their way.The mature professional woman doesn’t want some kind of goody-two-tyres vehicle with padded bumpers and wibbly-wobbly windscreen wipers that will tenderly cosset any pedestrian inconsiderate enough to stray onto its bonnet.What she wants is an urban assault vehicle designed to mow people down and shunt other cars into the next postcode.The only thing she cares about if she hits a pedestrian is to make sure no detached arms and legs get snagged in the undercarriage where they might cause messy problems.Her perfect car should at least carry a huge bull-bar with razor sharp spikes and preferably a cow-catcher scoop to toss what’s left of the target over onto the footpath.On the other hand, leaving a couple of victims impaled on the front end might serve as a gentle warning to the rest of the pedestrian population.A set of full metal tank tracks could be just the thing to let her simply grind up and over any rush hour traffic jam — and they certainly wouldn’t look out of place on most offroaders.And there’d be no exasperating delays at zebra crossings if a machine gun was on the optional accessories list, although it would be hard to choose between the handy extra trajectory offered by roof mounting or the convenience and better aerodynamics of 007-style artillery hidden in the headlights.No, the mature professional woman doesn’t want a pedestrian-friendly safety superstar for a car. She wants an armoured personnel carrier with a decent sized glovebox, multiple cupholders and an illuminated vanity mirror.

Some of Mazda’s effort has been achieved by liposuctioning out some of the fat, flabby steels and replacing them with trimmer, stronger ones. And some has been shed by taking the scalpel to the little car – reshaping a fitting here, shortening a wire there, even saving 690 grams by shaving the bonnet latch and hinges.This approaches the weight-whittling obsession of a Tour-de-France team technician, but has Madza really gone far enough?There are still plenty of opportunities for the car to get truly anorexic.What’s that mug-sized ashtray still doing in there? Out the window with that, and the cigarette lighter too. Other cars these days already have them on the optional list anyway – a far cry from a few years ago when any decent vehicle boasted an ashtray and lighter for every passenger, and one in the boot just in case the smoker was caught short while loading up the groceries.But don’t stop at the cancer accessories. You might as well ditch the vanity mirrors too. They’re always uselessly small and too poorly lit to actually see yourself in.And how many knobs does a radio really need? Nobody listens to the radio any more, except for a handful of anoraks commuting to university – and they only listen to Radio National. So … one knob for them, and none for the rest of you.But the main weight saving would be if we did away with the glovebox – which in itself is not a problem feature, being basically a box of nothing.The trouble is that we fill it with an average 8.32kg of junk that will never see light of day again except when we open the glovebox to try and cram more stuff in.Okay, I might have invented that precise figure to lend this drivel some sort of scientific plausibility. But you can’t deny the reasoning. When did you last see the bottom of your car glovebox, what’s in there anyway … and what the hell are you ferrying all that around for? Is there really going to come a day when you need three empty ballpoints and a 1952 street map of Paramatta, let alone all the other junk?And this is why people often complain they can’t match the fuel economy figures in the car brochure. The only time you’ll ever come close is the day you drive the car off the showroom floor. Every minute after that, it’s steadily bloating as it swallows more of your junk.It’s like Nicole Richie ramping up the anorexia fad, then complaining she’s having trouble hauling her ridiculously large handbag. Get rid of the dog, dear.The real key to weight saving for fuel economy is not in liposuctioning stuff off the car itself. It’s in performing a stomach stapling procedure to seal off all the spaces we cram with our stuff.Empty out your glovebox, doorbins, under the seat ... every cavity … and weigh it all in one huge untidy bundle. 30kg? 40kg? That sound you hear is clever Mazda engineers weeping in despair.