Mazda 6 News

You're looking at what will probably be the next Mazda 6.

The entry level Mazda 6 "Limited" model has been axed, while leather upholstery and parking sensors have become standard across all variants of the car.

He is - or was - Hirotaka Ono - a visionary who re-invented the Japanese brand and changed everything, from boosting the quality of its cars to creating the can-do attitude among senior managers that's essential for the success of any car company. Ono had a giant advantage because he was married to the daughter of company founder, Osama Suzuki.He was able to use his family connection to ramrod a range of changes which would have been impossible for anyone else, especially a 40-something revolutionary in a country which usually puts age and experience ahead of youth and enthusiasm. Even so, he still had to walk the walk on everything from design and driving enjoyment to bottom-line financial deals.The award winning Suzuki Swift is an Ono car, so too is the current Grand Vitara, as well as the Kizashi. His track record also includes the less-successful second-generation XL7, thankfully only sold in the USA, but everyone makes an occasional mistake. Ono died too early at the end of 2007, but not before he inspired the cars coming through Suzuki today and forecast the global financial crisis - as well as planning the way his company would react to the challenge."Thanks to Mr Ono we have learned what we can do. He inspired us," says Tak Hayasaki, managing director of Suzuki Australia. Hayasaki has his own challenges in trying to lift Suzuki's share of Australia's annual car sales from its current 2.4 per cent to around six per cent, but he knows he has the strongest lineup in the company's history.The Alto is too small for a lot of people, but a $12,990 driveway bottom line makes plenty of sense with six airbags, ABS and ESP, as well as alloy wheels. The Swift is getting very old but is still a good car, the Grand Vitara is a safe choice and the SX4 does a good enough job.Kizashi is the game-changer for Suzuki, the same as the first Mazda6 and Accord Euro were for Mazda and Honda, combining Euro-type driving enjoyment with Japanese quality.This week the company is adding an all-wheel drive car to the Kizashi line, the Sports, and believes it can boost its sales by 100 cars a month. That's 50 per cent of the current volume. It's a big call for a car which already goes head-to-head with Mazda6 and Euro and now faces up to the might of the Subaru Liberty, the car that convinced Australians about all-wheel drive.As he looks forward, with a new Swift before the end of the year - not   that you would pick it as all-new from pictures - Hayasaki knows where the credit goes. "I have to thankyou to Mr Ono for what he has given us. He proved that we can do it."

After leading the world on so many fronts - from quality to comfort and reliability - they have been hit badly by the global financial crisis.  Toyota and Honda and many of the others wound back dramatically at the onset of the GFC, not just on their production lines but also in their motorsport programs - F1 was the first casualty - and new-product development.We are now seeing the results in Australian showrooms, where the Corolla and Civic are now mid-pack in the small-car class and former pacesetters including the Mazda6, Honda Accord Euro and even the locally-made Camry are struggling against newer and better rivals.  They are fine for everyday transport, but not as impressive as they were just five years ago.Subaru has also cut costs and its latest styling work - particularly on the Liberty and Outback - reflects a desperate desire to win sales in the USA.  Contrast all of them against the Suzuki Kizashi, which comes from one of the few Japanese brands that held its nerve through the GFT. Suzuki has cut its production targets, and admits that extra Kizashi models are on the back-burner, but is going to do brilliantly well with the car.Toyota and Honda, in contrast, are relying on value-added deals to keep customers coming in Australia. They are recovering from the economic downturn but nowhere near as rapidly as some of their rivals  - particularly Hyundai.In Australia, many of our Japanese cars are now also actually built in Thailand. It's not a major drama, because the quality is much the same, but it shows how the battle to cut costs is influencing the Japanese makers. The Thai drive also shows that Japan Incorporated is now happy to produce bland transport modules instead of appealing cars, going for numbers first - in showrooms and on the balance sheet. It's a reasonable response to the GFC but is going to cause problems in coming years.Why? Because Australia is seeing so many classy European cars at more affordable prices - look at the Volkswagen Polo - and because Korean is coming up fast.  Hyundai is now doing a better job than Toyota at building Toyota-style cars, with adventurous styling, classy quality and great prices. It's latest, the i45 replacement for the dowdy Sonata, is really good on every front except its awful steering and lacklustre front suspension.The i45 is a Camry done better and, like the Kizashi, one of the stars of 2010. And it's not the end for Hyundai, which has all sorts of new models coming from the baby i20 to an overdue sporty car sometime in 2012.And that's whan the Japanese really could be in trouble. It's not because Hyundai has something new but because the Japanese wound their development programs back during the GFT and the results of that conservative risk management will not really be known until we see - or don't see - the work which should have been done over the past two years.Follow Paul Gover on Twitter!

The company is pushing ahead with plans to introduce its next-generation direct-injection petrol Sky G engines across the local range next year. The Sky D diesel engines are also in the pipeline.The company's head of global marketing, sales and customer service, Masazumi Wakayama, says the company is committed to lowering fuel economy across its entire range by 2015. "The Sky engines are critical to that goal," he says.Initially 2.0-litre petrol Sky G and a 2.2-litre diesel Sky D will arrive. The petrol engine is said to deliver a 15 per cent fuel economy gain while the diesel improvement is 20 per cent over current equivalent engines.Wakayama says the Sky G equipped Mazda3 delivers the same economy and emissions as today's Mazda2. Both the petrol and diesel engines will be mated with a new automatic transmission, called Sky-Drive, which acts like a dual clutch transmission.Importantly too, the Sky G engine will be mated to Toyota's hybrid drive system to power a new hybrid car. The hybrid is expected to arrive first in the Mazda6 around 2013 after both Japanese carmakers announced a hybrid technology sharing agreement last month.Wakayama says the Mazda hybrid will have all the qualities expected of a Mazda. "It will drive like a Mazda," he says.Although hybrids represent 20 per cent of total car sales in Japan, Wakayama believes the internal combustion engine is not dead. "We believe that the vast majority of cars will have internal combustion engines in 2030," he says. "That is why we are working to optimise these base technologies first.  This will benefit customers by minimising the cost of ownership."Apart from more efficient engines like the Sky range, Mazda is focused on reducing weight, introducing lower rolling resistance tyres and improved aerodynamics of its cars. "After that we will introduce stop-start and regenerative braking and hybrid systems," he says."The phased introduction of these technologies will form the future of Mazda. Of course this will eventually also lead to an electric vehicle too but we are not doing that straight away."

Most soft-road SUVs are front-wheel drives with on-demand 4WD systems of varying fallibility. The impression of extra space they convey is illusory. Their styling is usually unfortunate, and dynamically they range from acceptable to execrable.  They combine the shortcomings of legit four-wheel-drives and proper cars. And none of their virtues. Whereas increasingly, wagons are where it’s at – none more so than the up-tarted Mazda 6 Touring Wagon, which enters showrooms shortly. This cow-upholstered petrol auto version features the various virtually negligible tweaks common to the rest of the range which has copped its mid-lifecycle upgrade (next to no improvements were required). Oh alright, I’d like another 500 revs, a bit more power and a lot more down low torque – something direct injection and forced induction would address – but then I’d also like a land of autobahns, first class secondary roads and German standards of driver training for all license holders. The point is, the Mazda6 has more than enough of what it has. And if your driving life is typical, there are dynamic dimensions to this family lugger that you’ll never chart.  But if you do go there, the 6 will – as ever – go with you all the way. If only Audi did steering that was this meaningful all the time. If only all cars in which the front wheels do both the steering and the driving handled so superbly. Yet it’s functional to a fault with a rear seat-down storage capacity that at more than 1700 litres is sufficient to stack several sumos. And, to these jaded rheumy eyes, the Wagon is the best looker of the 6 range. The slightly smaller Mazda3 has become the favourite of private buyers in this wide brown land – yes, a car from Hiroshima, not elsewhere in Japan. And certainly not Melbourne or Adelaide. The bigger 6 starts in the 3’s price range and is a better family device. Mazda doesn’t aspire to the prestige label, but the 6 slays any number of European imports that hide their glaring deficiencies behind their ‘aspirational’ badges. It’s priced against the Camry but is degrees of magnitude superior to that duller-than-ditchwater device. And if you want an antidote to Camry Hybrid hype, try the Mazda6 diesel wagon with its 400Nm and 5.9l/100km.  These wagons do everything a soft roader purports – and much that it can’t.

Icy winds and snow are blowing across Motown, dumping on the auto capital of the world at a time when American politicians are applying relentless pressure for a major shift in the way that General M

With a pricepoint of $43,890, the turbo-diesel hatch is being pitched right into the European sports turbo-diesel territory

It would have been so easy for the Blue Oval team to drop the bundle as they worked towards producing a new car for a segment that was shrinking daily before their eyes.

The original 6 was a breakthrough car for Mazda and the Japanese car industry, as it was one of the first into the "Euro-Jap" world