That's a really strange comparison to make.

I don't understand this article. Why didn't you publish something earlier?  It wasn't as perfect as you'd hoped and hyped and you didn't want egg on your faces?  

Pretty slick package. Just have to replace that old 6 speed automatic. Maybe when the new RWD platform debuts we’ll see an 8, 9, or 10 speed

Haha it had never occurred to me before reading your post that the craptastic Five Hundred was an outright piss-poor reactionary response to the 300 selling so well.

Holy cow seriously? My 2013 300C is absolutely tauter than several Cadillacs I’ve driven. Only the CTS felt tighter, but wasn’t nearly as comfortable. Which one did you ride in? I’m an unabashed fan of the ride of the 2011+ models. Heavy-feeling as all hell, but I have no qualms about 90MPH+ abrupt maneuvers.

The car is perfect the the purpose it serves. Powerful enough, handsome enough, big enough and cheap enough.

You must have been riding in one seriously clapped out old one. Because I have them for rentals all the time in 300S form (and the occasional Limited, sad it’s going away), and I think they are pretty great. Nice enough, quick enough, quiet and comfortable, and they go down the road much like the old Mercedes they are…

Daimler and FCA’s handling of the 300 depresses me to no end. It was quite possibly the most interesting American car to come out of the “Merger of Equals” AKA the rape and pillage of Chrysler, and I dare say, the entirety of the 2000-2010 US Market. I know that it sits on an Archaic Mercedes platform, and that sedans…

My guess is it didn’t dawn on them to upgrade the brakes after jacking up the truck and stuffing huge offroad tires on it. No amount of LED light bars will help these dim bulbs.

What does race have to do with a car site? Please enlighten me

If you are browsing at home, I suggest setting up a Pi-hole DNS blocker. It blocks ads and other crap right from the beginning (they are not just blocked from showing up but they are not even loaded in the first place). At the moment the would-be-crap covers 40 percent of all DNS queries, so I save up a huge amount of…

OT rant here. Just tried to read an article from yesterday about some poor sap who bought 9 junked cars while living woth an HOA.

Yeah, manuals in traffic have never particularly bothered me and do afford some options for in-gear idling and such that you can’t do with an auto.

did you or have you even considered buying this car? I know I prefer sticks, and will probably at some point look for a G70 with a stick once prices get acceptable. problem is most of us stick guys don’t think buying new makes sense.

COVID traffic (meaning very little) has been friendly to the manual.

It’s all relative. I basically daily drove a heads/cam C5 Z06 for 3/4 of the year, most of it in stop and go traffic. Big heavy clutch, finessing to get it going because of the cam. It didn’t bother me at all. I now daily a 500 Abarth in manual, and it still doesn’t bother me.

If you are smart, you can finance a car at 0% and you won’t get screwed too badly. If you are smarter, you will find a decent used car, pay cash and laugh on the inside when your poor friends talk about car payments.

Agreed 100%. People talk about cars being “depreciating assets,” but it’s not an asset at all--it’s an expense. If you’re going to be paying the money at all, why not get what you want instead of a compromise?

I guess, primarily, because Mazda said it isn’t. And, per the article, it isn’t bonkers.  It’s just a regular Mazda 3, with prudent AWD, no manual transmission and a little more punch.

If the GTI is a hot hatch, why would the new Turbo Mazda 3 not be considered one?