I have an 06 Mazda 3 hatchback. Love it. My first car was a Mazda protege, also the hatchback version. I would LOVE to have what Nolu has once I'm ready to buy a new car. Sure, they're smaller than an SUV, but still enough space for me.
And the dogs love it
I love your car. :rofl1: And you will love your next car if it's a Speed3. Wait until they come out with the new body style Speed3s, it's going to be ridiculous.
I have a new Mazda2 and love it. It's so funny, everyone here is like "your call is so small!" but having lived in the UK for almost 2 years, I just think it's average-sized (maybe even a touch roomy).
Mazda2s have a surprising amount of interior space! I'm more comfortable in the back seat of a Mazda2 on a test drive than I am in a C-Class.
So, we took the Mazdas for a spin and while they were nice cars, I didn't really love the models we test drove (think "boring" midsized sedan type, nothing too zippy and fun
).
We'll check out Subaru next weekend... The weather kind of put everything on hold the last couple of weekends.
I do have a question for the car sales people here and really just out of curiosity: how much of a markup is there from a dealership? Let's say you get car x on the lot. How much do you pay and how much do you sell it for? I understand different factors might come into play..
Skip out on them, then. Mazda's are reliable and fuel efficient, but if you don't find them fun I see no reason to own one. You ought to LOVE the car you drive. Not just feel "meh" about it. It's a huge investment, so you need to be happy. At the end of the day, no one's opinion matters but your own - you
are the one paying the car payment, after all.
(I could tell you what plenty of people I know think about my choices in cars. . . but at the end of the day, I love what I drive, so who cares?)
For new cars, it's all out there - it's not a big secret. Truecar, edmunds, even KBB I think has invoice and MSRP on their websites. Usually between $400-$3,000 of markup. On a $16,000 car, for instance, there's not enough markup there to buy a nice set of tires. On a $42,000 Mazda there's over $2,300. On a $42,000 Audi there's $2100 of markup. So, it varies? Assume 5% of MSRP. On American makes it's usually a lot more.
Used cars, who the hell knows. Your salesperson doesn't know unless management tells them. It could be listed for $2,000 less than we own it for. At Audi we sometimes has used cars with $10,000 of markup. It's all a gamble - you buy the car at or below market trade, you HOPE there's nothing wrong with it, you try to retail it and you hope you got your calculations correct and that you'll make at least $500 off it. At the Audi I worked at in VA you couldn't make money off of used cars at all, and we lost $800-1600 a car because our used manager was an idiot. I once gave someone $16,000 for their lexus when excellent trade in was $11,000. And it had THREE accidents on the Carfax. If someone walked in and said "I want this for my car!" we gave it to them. That's really not how life should work, but I can totally give you their info if you want to buy a car from them. :rofl1: