A Mazda2 hot hatch was once considered for Australia

The Mazda2 is ancient at this point, but do you know what could spice it up? More power. However, while Mazda Australia tried to bring a brawnier version of Mazda’s smallest car over here, there’s a good reason why we can’t have it.

Performance cars in the pint-sized B-segment are, right now at least, pretty much limited to the Toyota GR Yaris, Volkswagen Polo GTI, Audi A1 40 TFSI, Abarth 695/500e, Mini Cooper JCW, and Hyundai i20 N.

Pricewise there’s a lot of airspace between those scrappy Jack Russells and the garden-variety hatches they’re born from, but for a brief period Mazda Australia was actively looking to put something into that gap.

Maybe not a proper GTI-fighting hot hatch, but at the very least a slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature shopping cart.

In Mexico, Mazda offers the Mazda2 hatch and sedan with a 2.0-litre petrol engine option, as well as the 1.5-litre naturally aspirated petrol that we get over here.

Closely related to the Mazda3’s G20 engine, it offers around 30 per cent more power and 32 per cent more torque than the 82kW, 144Nm G15 engine that’s the default powertrain here in Australia. We’ll save you from doing the maths: that’s a total power output of 105kW and a torque peak of 191Nm for the ‘big block’ 2.0-litre Mazda2.

Hardly an asphalt-scorcher, then, but considering the Mazda2 is a 1.1-tonne featherweight, it would have translated into perky performance nevertheless. That wasn’t lost on Mazda’s product planners.

“We tried, we tried,” Mazda Australia’s national manager of product and business strategy Daniel Wakelam said.

“But it’s left-hand drive only.”

The 2.0-litre version of the Mazda2 is only built at the company’s Mexico assembly plant in Salamanca, Guanajuato, and produced exclusively for Mexico and other Latin American markets across Central and South America.

With all those destinations being left-hand drive markets, a right-hook version is simply off the cards for Australia.

Revealed at the 2025 Tokyo Mobility Show, Mazda’s Vision-X concept hints at a sportier future for the next-gen Mazda2 and CX-3, which are expected to remain closely related beneath the surface.

It’s just a concept for now, but its appearance means we can expect the Mazda2 to finally get an all-new generation sometime in the next few years.

The big question remains: will a performance-oriented, big-block variant finally make its way to Australian shores?

We – and probably Mazda Australia’s product planners – have our fingers firmly crossed.

Join the conversation at our Facebook page
Or email us at editor@carsales.com.au