Comparison Test: 2011 Mazdaspeed3 vs. 2011 Mazda MX-5 Miata vs. 2011 Mazda RX-8 - Winding Road Magazine
We were messing around and looking at car discounts and deals online, when we stumbled upon the AOL Autos Best Deal tool. ) The online tool allows you to search for “best deal” by showing cars in your area that are being offered for the most money off of the baseline MSRP. At the time, we’d just booked a one-week loan of a Mazda RX-8, so we took a look at what discounts were available for the car (one we’ve always been pretty fond of). To our surprise, we found some pretty good deals: prices around the $25K mark. Of course, we wouldn’t really need the excuse of closer-than-expected pricing to pull the trigger on an all-Mazda sports comparison. And, of course, we’ve driven all of them more than a few times now, but never together, never like this. Front-drive and rear-drive. Clearly, taste will play a huge factor in which of these hot Mazdas appeals to you the most, but we wanted to know which offered the best total package for drivers. So we booked all three and took them out to drive on some of our favorite local roads. We’ve used the base five categories from our Involvement Index as reference points for our driving notes, and paid special attention to how the three Mazdas compare to each other, rather than to their “real” competitive. Source: www.windingroad.com
