I rent cars fairly often, sometimes just for a day other times for the weekend or a week if I'm traveling somewhere. I've driven many different cars over the last 6 months of doing this. All of my friends know this and will ask me about what cars I've driven and what I thought of them. Some cars I have really enjoyed and others I hated more than words can say. It wasn't until the other day that it occurred to me that I should do the occasional car review. I want to keep it simple and get to the core of what I do or don't like about the car. I don't want to get into technical discussions of the car because all that information is readily available from too many other sources. That being said, here's my first car review.
Last thursday I picked up a car from the local Hertz a couple of blocks from my house. They were kind enough, as they usually are, to upgrade me for free. They gave me a 2008 Mazda 3 four door. This is your average four door white car with no bells or whistles. At first I didn't really care for this car, it was uncomfortable and my leg would fall asleep if driven for a long distance. After one trip to San Jose, I was about ready to return it but first I decided to play with the seat adjustments and maybe I could make it work. I was able to find a comfortable position although I had to put the seat much further back than I would normally sit and pretty much eliminated the legroom for the seat behind me. Once I got used to sitting so far back I found the car to be very comfortable which is a good thing because I ended up putting over 1000 miles on this car in one weekend.
Most cars these days have ample cupholders and compartments to stash just about everything you could possibly want or have nearby while driving. This car was no exception.
One thing I really liked about this car was the radio controls on the steering wheel. There are the two volume buttons and one button for mute which is a nice touch that I haven't seen on other cars yet. You can scroll through your presets using two buttons on the steering wheel but you can't search for stations from the steering wheel which sucks.
The suspension felt fairly stiff, almost as stiff as a BMW 325 that I recently drove. It drove very well and handled the winding mountain roads very well. It is as sure footed a car as you can get, and better than almost any other car that I've driven in this price range. The engine was surprisingly strong being only a four cylinder engine. It has allot of pickup when you need it but has exceptional mileage. On average it got 30mpg with a day of about evenly split highway driving and city driving. On one day of almost all freeway driving including driving in the Sierras it managed to squeeze out just over 35mpg. I was starting to like this car more and more.
