For decades, if you wanted a mainstream family sedan that was actually fun to drive, it was hard to do better than the Mazda 6 or its predecessor the 626. Sure, it was front-wheel drive, but the engineers delivered in the handling department. Now that Mazda’s moved upmarket and begun selling the rear-wheel-drive-based CX-90, though, rumors of a rear-wheel-drive Mazda 6 revival keep popping up. Recently, a Mazda executive told Australia’s Drive that it’s still possible, but people are going to have to start buying sedans again.
Speaking to Drive, Mazda Large Product Group boss Kohei Shibata said, “Personally, a FR [front-engined, rear-wheel drive] sedan would be a good dream for everyone. Journalists always tell me that you should make a sedan, but the marketplace is so small. So if … the people start to buy that kind of vehicle, then that will let us make that vehicle.”
See? All we need to do is start collectively buying hundreds of thousands of additional sedans, and Mazda will be forced to approve the development of a rear-drive sport sedan. With an inline-six under the hood! We could even start a letter-writing campaign telling Mazda corporate every single time we buy a sedan that could have been a new Mazda 6 if it had been an option. I think we can do it, y’all.
Let’s just not talk about the part where there’s almost no chance that such a sedan would be offered with a manual transmission option. That ship sailed when people stopped teaching kids how to drive stick. Also, the parts where new cars are expensive as hell, interest rates are still high, and not many people could afford to spend $20,000 on a car, much less the $40,000-plus that it would cost to get into a new six-cylinder Mazda 6. Or that the general public is no longer interested in sedans.
If we could just change reality, though, a new six-cylinder Mazda 6 built on a rear-wheel-drive platform would basically be guaranteed. Anyone here know how to change reality?