Mazda3

The Mazda3 is one of 180 Mazda models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 2003. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Mazda3 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Bentley Bentley Continental GT, the Ford Ford Mustang, the Volvo Cars Volvo XC90 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Mazda3 reads like this: the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Mazda story

Within Mazda's own catalogue the Mazda3 sits alongside the Mazda BT-50, the Mazda T2000, the Efini MS-8, the Mazda 121. The record names the Mazda 323/Mazda Familia/Mazda Protegé as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Design is credited to Hasip Girgin (2001). Assembly is recorded at Japan: Hōfu (Hofu (Mazda factory) / Hōfu Plant No. 1) / China: Chongqing/Hainan / Taiwan: Ford Lio Ho Motor / Colombia: Bogotá (Compañía Colombiana Automotriz) / Philippines: .

On the record

For the years the United States federal record covers, EPA-rated economy comes in at 27 mpg combined, which works out near $2,450 a year in fuel at current prices.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Mazda3 costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.