2005 Mazda 3 Sport GT

My first car, bought on August 10th. It got the 2.3L engine, which is developping a correct 160 hp, and (sadly) coupled to an automatic 4-speed tranny, but hey I still got a sequential mode. It had 107 200 km when I bought it August 10th, which was pretty low for a 12-years old car: it now has around 114 700 km as on November 3rd, 2017. It does around 8L/100 km in average, and I do 85% of my mileage on highway/road, but I expected a bit worse. Sure, it would probably consume less with the 5-speed manual tranny (I’m at 3000 rpm on 4th gear at 105 km/h on the highway), but I got what I got. Has enough place for what I want, and I can put big objects in it, which could not be possible on the sedan. However, I realised the size of our minivan when I opened the liftgate of our minivan again, the other day. Compared to my M3, it is enormous.

In this car, I got rear-ended, (by some girl who “did forget” to look in her mirrors. Result: big bump on my bumper, almost nothing on hers, but I got it repaired by her insurance), was victim of actual road rage (somebody actually got physically violent toward me), ran ~300+ km without oil (engine was miraculously not damaged), almost rear-ended a school bus, drove over 7000 km with broken rear coil springs and 1000 km with them missing a part of each coil spring on each side. In three months of ownership (updating on November 3rd 2017).

And you know what? Even though I spent almost the equivalent of the value on the car, just on repairs (and it will continue), in just three months, I still madly love it. I think I’ll name it “Dark Lemon” or “Black Lemon”.

UPDATE (November 8th 2019): I no longer have the car, I had to part away with it on October 18th, after two years and two months of ownership, and sadly send it to the scrapyard. It had about 159,500 km. It didn’t get into an accident or anything: it’s just that it was getting more and more rusted, and it had been sitting on the street for a whole month.

I would have kept it if I could, but I didn’t really have any place to store it and my father just wanted to see it gone, both from the street and from my ownership. It was still driving, insured and registered, so I wanted to sell it, but then (I’m serious), he got afraid that someone would buy it, get into an accident and sue us for a million because the buyer would somehow tell people that I had hidden problems. On a car I’d have sold for $600-$800.

I’m not joking.

With his logic, it completely defeats the whole point of selling parts cars, but whatever I guess.

One thing for sure, I’ll one day end up buying another first-gen 3 Sport (stickshift this time) or a first-gen Speed3. It’s just too good.