Mazda3 Turbo on agenda for Oz

When the all-wheel drive Mazda3 Turbo was unleashed in the US last year, it sent hot hatch fans into a frenzy.

Widely expected to rekindle the magic of the tyre-shredding Mazda3 MPS – and give the Volkswagen Golf GTI a run for its money – elation soon turned to frustration when the car-maker confirmed the 2.5-litre turbo-petrol road warrior was not on the agenda for Australia.

Despite being offered only in left-hand drive, Mazda Australia is still pursuing the Mazda3 Turbo and has not given up on offering the speedy 186kW/434Nm hot hatch here.

“We keep asking, we’ve got a good relationship with the program manager for Mazda3, so we continue to have those conversations and remind them that we’re very keen. And he’s keen. He’d love to deliver it for us,” said Mazda Australia’s director of marketing, Alastair Doak.

Fitted with a six-speed automatic transmission, the all-paw turbocharged Mazda3 would give the Japanese brand a much-needed halo model to sit front and centre in showrooms, particularly with Mazda3 now struggling as buyers move away from traditional small cars.

Once Australia’s top-selling model, Mazda3 sales dropped by more than 40 per cent in 2020, from almost 25,000 units to just under 15,000.

This is a long way from the 40,000-plus annual sales the Mazda3 routinely racked up from 2011 through to 2014.

“We’ve asked for it and we’ve always been asking for it. So we do recognise there’s a role for a product like that in our line-up and in Australia,” said Doak.

“But unfortunately there’s engineering requirements for right-hand drive and basically on a global scale we can’t justify enough volume for that investment at this point.

“So whether that changes in the future? Fingers crossed.”

Doak explained that hot hatches “don’t sell in particularly large numbers in Japan, and so that’s a key right-hand drive market” which makes it tough to secure the engineering investment required.

In the US, the Mazda3 Turbo is offered in both sedan and hatch body styles, priced from $US29,900 ($A38,600).

At this stage there’s no manual gearbox option but given hot hatch buyers tend to favour automatic transmissions, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker.

Asked if the amelioration of development costs will make the proposition of bringing the Mazda3 Turbo to Australia more likely down the track, Doak responded: “Potentially.”

“And you know Mazda is coming up with the large [vehicle] architecture, that’s the peak of development and that’s soaking up a huge amount of engineering resource, so when you free that up, maybe you can come back and have another conversation about it and maybe gives you a foot in the door,” he added.

“We haven’t given up, we keep asking.”