Aren’t the Japanese just the loveliest people?
There they are, beavering away to make cars, and SUVs in particular, that will make us happy little Vegemites and yet, when you actually visit Japan, you realise that they can’t actually own the cars they’re building, vehicles like the new Mazda CX-60 we just went there to drive, because they just wouldn’t fit.
To own a car in Japan, you first have to prove that you have somewhere to park it. Yes, that’s how tight space is there; they have 338 people per square kilometre, while we have… 3.3 per kilometre.
They drive tiny little, Hello Kitty-like cars, while we drive utes. In four days of driving around Mazda’s home city of Hiroshima, I saw exactly zero Mazda BT-50s or Toyota HiLuxes. The biggest vehicles were Mazda CX-5s.
It should come as little surprise, then, that the properly big CX-60, built on Mazda’s new ‘Large Architecture Platform’, is not expected to have a large domestic market in Japan.
They’re making it for us, Australians and other westerners. And in this case, they’re making it to really impress us, because the CX-60 is Mazda’s attempt to go premium, taking on the Germans, and Lexus.
So how have they done?
Keyword: Mazda CX-60 2023 review: Diesel