The new Mazda3 Hatchback comes loaded with turbo power and all-wheel drive.  Photo by John Gilbert.

One of the most admirable things about auto manufacturers is when they refuse to compromise their ideals for performance, handling and fuel-efficiency. Several car-makers answer that call, but Mazda has a major tradition of also insisting that their vehicles are fun to drive.
The company’s “Zoom-zoom” ad campaign stressed that point, and even though Mazda has moved on to other ad ideas, whenever you get to drive a Mazda the zoom-zoom concept comes back into your consciousness.
Now that we’re into the 2022 model year, it’s a good time to catch up on exactly where Mazda is with its best-handling and best-performing Mazda3.
The word is, Mazda engineers have done so many technical things to their cars at bargain prices, the company is intending to shift their focus to a slightly higher price in order to more fully stress the high-tech nature of its cars.
The Mazda3 is Mazda’s compact, competing in the marketplace against the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Sentra, Hyundai Elantra, Kia Forte and Volkswagen Jetta. All of them are good, strong bargains in the segment that requires durable and maintenance-free autos.
If the Mazda3 seems to outflank its worthy competitors year after year, it has not missed a step for 2022.
The Mazda3 comes in both a sedan and a hatchback. My wife, Joan, favors the look of the sedan, which looks a lot like a scaled-down Mazda6 large sedan.
I like that one, too, but my favorite is the hatchback. It is far more than just a sedan with a bobbed tail. I find the silhouette of the Mazda3 Hatchback captivating, sort of like a near-SUV that has a shapely look from the rear’s rounded off lines, while maintaining a sporty look ahead of that bulging rear.

Mazda, of course, still makes an array of SUVs, with the compact CX-5 dominating sales because, frankly, it is a roomy compact SUV that handles and drives like the Mazda3. And that is saying something.
You could go the other way with the Mazda3 Hatchback and say that it is a precise, near-perfect handling vehicle that just happens to have SUV-like space in the rear seat and under the hatch.
Mazda puts its home-built all-wheel-drive system into all the Mazda3 models with the turbo engine, otherwise it’s optional. A lot of people may not insist on having it, but in Minnesota winters, we want it, thank you.
As for the technology, Mazda starts out with the superb 2.0-liter 4-cylinder, and offers more power with a new 2.5-liter 4-cylinder, and in the new car, the 2.5 can be had with a turbocharged 250 horsepower and 320 foot-pounds of torque. That is the one I test-drove, in the Premium Plus model loaded up with options.

The price tag on my test car was $35,610, and it came equipped with all-wheel drive and painted Polymetal Gray Metallic – much like the now-popular flat-gray paint jobs, only with an underlying metallic coat that gives life to the flat gray.
The new chassis is stiffer, which makes it better handling than the previous good-handling Mazda3, which took some doing. But Mazda has a couple of now-proven experiments in technology that help it take giant strides while competitors are still trying to catch up.
First is the SkyActiv engine-building process, which Mazda developed painstakingly a decade ago as an entirely new concept and started with a clean sheet of paper and included all the latest contemporary valve-timing trickery and resulted in the ability to build the engines with high compression but still use regular fuel.

Second is the remarkable G-Vectoring trick on the suspension system, which technically causes the outside front wheel’s suspension to get a millisecond dose of less power, timed with an instant of softened shocks.
Instincts might suggest doing the opposite – firming up the outside front and adding power – but Mazda perfected the unique system. So when you drive hard into a corner or on a curvy road, you swerve or turn, and as if by magic your car responds with razor-sharp precision.
I have to remind people that when test-driving a Mazda with G-Vectoring, push it hard around a corner and then do it a couple more times. Then pause to realize that you never had to make a steering correction to straighten out your car. It turns precisely, and because of that inordinate precision, you don’t have to correct it.

It is so impressive, and a contributor to safer car handling, that it is nothing short of amusing when prominent auto reviews in major magazines rank the newest Mazda3 behind a competitor or two, and actually write that it’s lost its previous “fun to drive” mantra.
No. It hasn’t. G-vectoring won’t allow it, and rank your cars again, folks, and see if any of the others fly around a curve without the need of any correction.
The seats are firm and comfortable, and the things like the dashboard and center information screen are well laid out.
I will complain that I think the new audio system is caught up in the complexity game, where it takes a teenager to figure it out. In the old days, Mazda would give you a knob to push to turn it on, and twist to get more volume.
Not any more. The system is great, but setting a preset is frustrating well beyond the point of annoyance.
My only other concern is that while I was totally impressed with the near-race-car acceleration of the Mazda3 Hatch, I had difficulty reaching the 31 miles per gallon highway estimate. We got more like 25-27.
I like my Mazdas to get the best fuel economy around, and if Mazda has sacrificed some gas mileage for mind-blowing power, I’d gladly accept less power and more MPG.