Mazda 2 Pure: Manual, safe ... the perfect car for a learner
I decided, cruelly and uncoolly, to teach my son to drive in a manual car. This is just one of the many, many ways in which I am wrong about things, apparently. How did he fare?
Among the thousands of things about parenting that no-one really explains – perhaps because the human race would sputter to a stop if men genuinely knew everything before diving in – is that it will turn you into a superhero. Clearly, this is one of the good parts, as your offspring don’t merely love you when they’re young, they worship you as a deity; they honestly believe that you have super strength and speed, and treat your every utterance as not only true but fascinating.
And then, like God himself pulling his leg back slowly for 13-odd years and then unleashing it to smash you brutally in the balls, they become teenagers, and you go from cool and amazing to not only boring but preposterous, stupid and “cringey”.
After so many years in which he believed my pronouncements that AC/DC were the world’s greatest live band and the Beatles were history’s greatest song writers, my son, now 16, has disavowed my personal religious tenets to declare Radiohead his one God and, worse still, to describe hip-hop as music.
It is at this point, cruelly and unwisely, that the authorities decide it is a good time for me to teach him to drive, and that I decided, cruelly and uncoolly, to do so in a manual car, because I believe this is the right way to develop mechanical sympathy, bond with the machine and be a better motorist.
This – in a country in which it was recently revealed that nine out of 10 teens now choose to take their licence test in an automatic – is just one of the many, many ways in which I am wrong about things, apparently. Yet, as I once told him when he was young enough to believe it, if you look up “obdurate” in the dictionary you will find a picture of me – and so it was that I hatched a plan to prove myself right.
Mazda recently relaunched an updated version of its tiny 2 and, because they’re aware that the only people who want a car that smallthese days are those who find parking a challenge, they launched it by inviting journalists to come and re-sit their driving tests.
I was busy washing my chair that day, but I was keen on the idea that the Mazda 2 is perhaps the ideal size for a Learner’s car and is available with both a manual gearbox and, that rarest of things in a modern car, a handbrake (hill starts are no longer a thing, sadly, thanks to automatic brake-hold systems).
I planned to take the Mazda 2 and the teen to Sydney Motorsport Park, where, on the first Tuesday of each month, a company called Driving Solutions (with the assistance of a few NSW Highway Patrol wallopers who come along and pretend to be friendly human beings) runs a free night where you can bring your L plater and lap the circuit, at a max speed of 80km/h. The idea is not to learn track craft but simply to provide a safe place for driving, with no oncoming traffic, intersections, pot holes or mean, horrible licensed drivers who see your L plates and instantly try to bully you on the road (believe me, those people are out there, and they suck).
Unfortunately, Mazda gave me the automatic version of the 2, which my son described as the worst car he’d ever driven (not saying much, but still, he also said it made him think autos were “boring”). This little smiley car is not oversupplied with power, making just 81kW and 142Nm from its 1.5-litre engine, but the auto transmission basically anaesthetises everything it does have and turns it into a slug in a packet of salt.
So we took the family VW Golf (manual, of course) and lapped the track in that instead, which was wondrous, as it seemed to prove to the boy that I’d been right about something else: driving can be hugely fun (all right, so I might have talked a little bit about apexes).
Fortunately, a week later I managed to get the six-speed manual Mazda 2, which, because it allows you to stretch its engine in every gear and to interact with the machine in a more intimate way, is a hoot to drive, and yet still not fast enough to be dangerous. Its small wheelbase makes it not only easy to reverse park, but fun to go around roundabouts in.
Vitally, it also has all of the safety systems that I suddenly became so interested in once we had a Learner in the house. And speaking of him, he loved the manual Mazda, couldn’t believe it was even the same car as the auto he’d suffered before, and quickly came to realise the essential and absolute superiority of manual gearboxes. Indeed, the Mazda 2 might be one of the best cars to prove that point.
Best of all, though, through slightly gritted teeth and with that low-resonance groaning sound that teenagers tend to speak in, my son said those cherished and rare words: “Yes, you were right.”
