Recently I replaced my old Mazda 3 with the new model. The two are practically identical – why mess with a good thing? it’s a fine car! – but there are some minor differences, and I’ll be blogging them now and then… they afford us a peek into the design team’s thinking processes.
Here is the trunk door on the previous model. The problem is, it is not spring loaded; to open it you had to press the lock button and then claw it open by trying to pry up the bottom edge, which is a tight fit to the bumper below it (on most cars the door at least has some depression, perhaps for the license plate, where you can grasp it; this door is smooth and lacks any such grab point).
Quite annoying, and a lovely bit of poor usability. In fact, I saw one of these cars on the road whose enterprising owner had screwed a handle – from a kitchen drawer, by the looks of it – onto this door!
So here is the same door on the new model. Same door – one key difference: now there is a depression in the bumper to allow you to grasp the door.
People must have been complaining – and the design team at Mazda had been listening. Better late than never!
June 20, 2008 — 7:31 pm
That’s funny. I used to have a Mazda 3 hatchback (from the first year of production) and if I remember right it had this bumper groove to help open the hatch. So the designers must have thought it was necessary for the hatch but not for the trunk on the 4-door, and later learned they were wrong.
June 21, 2008 — 10:06 am
Thanks Kevin for adding a piece to the puzzle! As I wrote, we can’t talk to the designers, but we can deduce their thinking process from the glimpses we see in their output…
October 25, 2009 — 9:57 am
i like the build quality of the Mazda 3 plus it looks very cool too.