It Sucks, But Sometimes You Have To Pay For A Car Just To Exist

The cars I love are not for everyone. I don’t just mean obscure French wagons or micro Japanese off-roaders that fill my stray thoughts. I mean the kinds of sports cars and hatchbacks that were once common on America’s roads. It’s awkward to admit, but even the sportiest hatchbacks of yore were economy cars underneath and were therefore built on affordable bones. That doesn’t work anymore.

I’ve been putting off writing up a review of the 2025 Mazda3 2.5T Premium Plus AWD because I liked the car. It would be much easier if I didn’t. The problem is the price. Six months ago, when I tested it, the Mazda was $38,865. While that’s lower than the $50,000 average transaction price, it’s still a lot for a compact hatchback.

It being built in Japan creates more problems, which I’ll get into.

My first instinct was to complain. To point out that in 2005, a nice Mazda3 hatch cost around $20,130 on the high end, which is roughly $34,000 with inflation. This car is nicer, sure, and more advanced in many ways. Perhaps a closer analog would be the Mazdaspeed3, which cost around $23,000 in 2007 when it debuted.

This site is known for vigorously complaining about the lack of affordability in new cars, and I’ve written at length about it. That’s all still valid. New cars are too expensive, and while some of it can be attributed to things people want (safety, connectivity, performance, reliability), the pursuit of higher margins and over-featuring plays a role as well.

I’m of a different mind with this car. If you buy this specific vehicle, you are not just paying for the car. Your dollars are not solely going to the engineering, the marketing, the building, and the shipping. You are paying for this car to exist. You are paying for there to be a sufficient margin to offset the loss in volume.

Rather than review the car, I’m going to try and justify its existence.

Let’s Do A Little Math

The math can get complex, so I’ll simplify it using some very general numbers. In 2005, Mazda sold 97,388 Mazda3s in total (according to GoodCarBadCar.net). In 2024, Mazda sold 38,877. For the sake of math, I’ll assume a 5% margin; if the average price between all models was $17,500, those cars yielded a profit of about $85 million. Not bad.

Let’s look at today. If Mazda wanted to make $85 million in profit (and not the inflation-adjusted amount), it would need to make $2,200 a car, basically. The new car is between $25k-38k, so if we skew towards a lower average of $30k, that’s a 7.3% margin.

Other than the sales volume, these numbers are just rough estimates to demonstrate a point. I don’t know the specific margin Mazda made on these cars or how much discounting occurred, et cetera. But for the sake of hypothetical math, if Mazda wanted to make the same inflation-adjusted amount of money (so, roughly $163 million), then the company would need to make $4,193 per car, or a 14% margin on average.

In reality, Mazda is historically a much lower margin automaker, meaning that 14% is a stretch. Back in 2005, that number was maybe closer to 3%. My point is that as these cars sell in lower numbers, either they have to get cheaper to build or, to some degree, nicer and more expensive.

A good example is the Nissan Sentra. This is a cheap sedan meant to sell in volume. While there are nicer trims, Nissan has no real issue with positioning the Sentra as a good enough car at a good enough price. Yes, Mazda has a lower trim option (a FWD S sedan is about $26,000), but that’s not the one you want.

The hatch is the car to have, either in FWD spec with the manual (starting around $33,000) or loaded to the hilt in turbo premium trim.

What You Get For Your $38,000

Above is the window sticker for this car, just to give you a sense of all the stuff that’s in it. It’s a lot!

When spec’d above, the starting price is $36,950, because that comes with almost everything. The good power seats, the 227-horsepower turbo engine with 310 lb-ft of torque, the 18-inch black wheels, AWD, the nice leather-trimmed bits, and the adaptive lighting.

The only true option here is the $595 for the Soul Red Crystal paint. As discussed, there’s almost no better red on the planet, so it’s probably worthwhile. This is one of the best-looking cars being sold today. It feels great to drive, and it doesn’t have a lot of specific cars to compare to, as it exists in an interesting space in the market.

I would take one of these over a BMW X1 or Mercedes GLA, if you want something on the smaller end that’s luxurious and AWD. Those cars are both $43,000+ cars. If you don’t care about spinning all four wheels, a Golf GTI is $33,000 and has some advantages. A fairer comparison to that vehicle is the similarly-priced manual Mazda3.

There’s clearly still a market for these cars, as tens of thousands of people are lining up for one every year. The car isn’t the default choice, though, as that’s probably the Mazda CX-50 or Mazda CX-5. The Mazda3 in hatchback bodystyle is something you have to want, and if you want it, you’ll have to pay for it. If you want value, the value car for Mazda is now a crossover.

An interesting alternative will come in the form of the Kia K4 Hatch, which won’t be as nice or as powerful, but has the aesthetic down. I’d also entertain an argument that the Prius Prime XSE is in the conversation.

You Can Play This Game With All Sorts Of Cars

To some extent, the fun cars have always come with a bit of a price premium. Even in the late 1970s, when Camaro sales were at their peak, the muscle car was being outsold by the mediocre Malibu (which could be had as a coupe, wagon, or sedan). The volumes used to be much higher, though, and with smaller volumes must come a higher price.

It’s easier to justify this price, perhaps, when it’s a car like the Mustang GTD, where you can see all the work that went into making one specific car. It gets a little harder with something like a Volkswagen Golf R, which costs almost $50,000, or the price of a nicely-equipped Ford Mustang GT. When you compare it to regular cars, the number is even harder to comprehend. For the price of a Golf R, you can have a Woodland Edition Sienna and haul all of your friends.

The same goes for the Corolla GR or Subaru WRX, or just about any car you think is fun. Now that the base version of these cars is no longer the most popular vehicle in any specific lineup, the costs are going to have to go up to keep bringing them to market.

It’s not great. It’s not my preferred outcome. I wish more people were buying hatchbacks than crossovers because that’s what I like.

So, Is It Worth It?

Rather than complain about the high prices of enthusiast cars, I think the better question is: Is it worth the money? Do I get, as Matt Farah might ask, a $38,000 driving experience out of this car?

I’d say the answer is “yes” on this specific car. On aesthetics alone, there are few cars in any price range that can touch it. The rear seat is usable. Dynamically, it’s a modern Mazda, so it is incredibly composed even if you try to drive it like a wang. With the turbo motor and AWD, it leaps to 60 mph in under 6 seconds and keeps pulling until you’re already above the speed limit.

There’s a caveat, though. I drove this car, and then I drove my friend’s Mazda3. He’s a professional car designer and loves the look of the hatchback. Like any decent fellow, he wanted a stick, so he had to opt for the FWD non-turbo. This is a shortcoming in the lineup. If you’re already making me pay a high price for a car, I’d hope to be able to get it in the best spec.

At around $33,000, the non-turbo manual hatch is probably the best enthusiast version of this car, though even that feels like a lot of money to me. I guess this is me talking myself out of the premise of this whole post. I want these cars to exist, and I’m willing to pay for them. At the same time, I struggle with the notion of actually doing so.

This is the challenge of modern car enthusiasm, and I think it explains why, for instance, this 20-year-old Volvo wagon is already being bid up to $19,000 on Cars & Bids. Fewer and fewer of these cars will exist, so the options are to get the nice new version with a warranty now or pay out-the-nose for something older and, probably, less reliable.