![]() It appears Mazda doesn’t want to go out of business. Maybe – just maybe – this is the re-start of the car business, which seems to be on the verge of going out of business due to lack of interest. Or costing so much that only a lucky affluent few will be able to enjoy it. Mazda says – can you hear the glee – that the new six emits a “rewarding” exhaust note (something no EeeeeeeeVeeeee offers, except in simulated form) and manages “efficiency without compromising performance.” ![]() That figure by the way, is a bell-ringer in that it represents the strongest engine Mazda has ever made standard in a mass-produced model. ![]() The engine cuts off when the CX-90 is coasting or not moving and comes back on when you need or want the 340 horsepower it makes. The new 3.3 liter in-line six uses as little gas as a 2.0 liter four by not using any gas at all sometimes. So, how does Mazda get away with bringing out a new six, making it standard – and selling it in a large (eight passenger) crossover SUV for less than $40k to start? Which by the way is thousands less than it costs to buy a compact-sized EeeeeeeeVeeeeee that seats four realistically and is realistically useful for short-distance driving only?īy hybridizing it. Yet, somehow, Mazda is going to put a standard six in the new CX-90, which will reportedly sticker for less than $40k to start. The pressure to engine-geld is so great it affects even cars like that – meaning cars that are not inexpensive. Now they’re options – and probably not for long. This includes models like the BMW 5 Series and Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan, both of which used to always come standard with sixes. There are only one or two models in the $40k price range that still come standard with them (the Lexus ES350 being a kind of last of the Mohicans) and most in the $50k prices range now come standard with. Thus were rear-drive cars (and standard sixes) driven off the mass market, leaving a handful of such cars for the luxury-car market.Īnd even they have been shorn of their sixes, most of them. ![]() But they were rendered more and more expensive to buy, via indirect taxes styled “gas guzzler” fines that were applied to the manufacturers and then passed along to buyers, who increasingly could not afford to pay them. Those that didn’t could technically still be manufactured and offered for sale. The apparatchiks – a term borrowed from Soviet Russia, which America is in process of becoming – somehow got the power to tell American car buyers that their next new car must average such-and-such miles-per-gallon. They did this via the extra-skulky means of out-regulating (as opposed to out-lawing) them. Well, with the exception – soon to no longer be one – of the Dodge Charger, which is being pushed off the market by the same people – the same government apparatchiks who tell us what we’re allowed to buy and how much we’ll be paying for it – who pushed cars like the Nova and Dart off the market. Today, there is nothing comparably laid-out that doesn’t cost at least $50,000. These were not expensive cars but they were rear-wheel-drive and they came standard with a six cylinder engine both offered V8s, too. A good example – one of many – being a car like the Chevy Nova of the ’70s and also the Dodge Dart of the same era. Often, a V8 engine was available, optionally. These rear-drive cars of the past also almost always came with at least a six. You could drive an economy car if you wanted to. This was once possible because rear-drive cars were once affordable. But it was once the case that average people regularly drove rear-drive cars that were similar-in-layout to the expensive cars driven by the affluent. Not that there is anything wrong with economy cars. But it is – fundamentally – an economy car layout. Front-wheel-drive has its advantages, of course. The latter also a change for the better in that it’s a change away from front-wheel-drive practically everything.
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