REPORT 1: (2nd MAY 2025)
Mileage: 33km
A major topic of discussion in the DRIVEN Car Guide office this year: models that we haven’t reviewed for years, but are still consistently popular among Kiwi buyers. Yep, we’re a fun crowd to be around.
It’s the nature of the job that we mainly review cars that are box-fresh and just released; because news value usually drives stories and on a purely pragmatic level, they’re the ones that car brands send around for evaluation. That’s just the way things work.
But we’ve been on a bit of mission in 2025 to bring our road-test database up-to-date around cars that are popular with buyers, but aren’t brand new. Cars like the Kia Seltos and Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross are good examples.
We’ve been especially keen to get back into a Mazda CX-3, because it’s a model that’s been on the market for more than a decade (overall DRIVEN COTY for 2015, no less) and still consistently popular in the Mazda portfolio. It's a modest 10% of the overall mix, but showing no sign of fading away. It keeps ticking along.
It’s not always easy securing a more established model for review, simply because brands don’t have them on the fleet any more.
When we approached Mazda about a CX-3, the company came back with a broader idea: a long-term test rather than a week-long review, which might be a better way to understand why this car still attracts a loyal following.
Done. So here it is: fresh off the boat, a CX-3 SP20 with just 33km on the clock. That’s already a novelty; we don’t often get a car to drive that’s genuinely brand-new; it's like being a real CX-3 buyer.
We reckon the CX-3 still looks pretty good after all these years, familiar as it is. Ours is the flagship SP20 model, identified by its gloss-black exterior details (other CX-3s have unpainted plastic wheelarch flares, for example) and two-tone paintjob with Brilliant Black roof.
At $42,190 the SP20 is $3250 more than the mid-range GSX and adds leather/suede seat upholstery (complete with racy arrow graphics), heating for the front chairs, and black metallic/machined 18-inch wheels.
It’s fundamentally the same car that was launched a decade ago, but naturally the CX-3 specification hasn’t been stagnant. Our SP20 is the most recent update, introduced in late-2023 as a new flagship to better align with another Mazda small-SUV, the CX-30, also available in SP-trim. The arrival of CX-3 SP20 also meant goodbye to the Limited.
All CX-3s now have the 2.0-litre 4-cylinder (110kW/195Nm) engine, with a 6-speed automatic and front-drive.
There used to be an AWD option and even a diesel. Diesel engines, remember when small cars had those? The little-D was discontinued in a major model update in 2017 and AWD was rationalised to just one model at the same time, before being phased out in 2021.
We might have a slightly distorted view of just how new driver-assist technology is, but we’re pleasantly surprised how much of it the SP20 has. Some has been added along the way of course, but from the start the CX-3 was available with autonomous braking, blind-spot warning and lane departure.
That 2017 update brought G-Vectoring control (a Mazda-proprietary thing that gently reduces engine torque to help with cornering accuracy), traffic sign recognition and radar cruise control. It also now has “smart brake support” (ie autonomous braking) front and rear.
So in terms of what you’d expect to find in a car just released, there’s not a lot missing. The most obvious omission is a camera-based driver distraction alert, which we’re not too cut up about (there is a more passive “driver attention alert” that will suggest you take a break when appropriate). And the lane departure warning really is just a warning, a rather soothing humm that comes through the audio speakers; no steering assistance.
The analogue instrumentation does date the car: the central revcounter (which we quite like, very, um.. Porsche) is flanked by two crude-looking digital displays. But they do the job. And you do get a small heads-up display with much more modern graphics, in full colour; that’s where you’ll find some of the add-on stuff like traffic sign recognition and the distance indicator for the adaptive cruise.
And yes, that is quite a small infotainment display: just 8 inches in diameter, and that’s after a size increase along the model-upgrade journey. It runs on the older MZD Connect operating system, mainly through a BMW iDrive-style rotary controller with pushbutton shortcuts; the screen has touch functionality, but only when the car is stationary… one of Mazda’s more unusual decisions, now superseded in newer models.
But the CX-3 does have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto phone projection, both added in 2021; wireless for the former, or with a cable for the latter.
We’re spending the next three months with the SP20. Enough time to find out whether the ownership experience has aged as well as the car’s cute looks.
What is the Mazda CX-3?
A compact-SUV loosely based on the Mazda2 hatchback, launched in NZ way back in 2015. It remains a consistent seller for Mazda NZ.
Why are we running it?
To see whether a model that's not the very latest can still be be an engaging urban SUV.