New Mazda 6- trying not to be an appliance for the appliance buyer

By the time you finish this paragraph, someone will have driven home with an appliance car. They will awaken tomorrow morning and turn the key to their transportation device, back it out of their vinyl-sided suburban domicile, and quietly motor to work. This is what we've been told will happen when we get older, get jobs, and need to start transporting hatchlings to soccer practice. This is also why we are glad that sporty mainstream sedans like the previous Mazda6 exist, because given the choice between floating around in a mayonnaise-filled sensory deprivation tank on wheels and not having kids, the staggering emasculation of a vasectomy actually starts to look like a good option.

The thing is, there weren't enough buyers of a similar mind to make the 6 catch on in North America. Designed as a global sedan, it was sold in the States with the same compact dimensions that helped it scoot down the narrow backstreets of Japan. To hear Mazda execs tell it, expecting a midsize car with a tiny backseat to win over buyers on account of its eager handling made about as much sense as going to Benihana for the pierogi. To hear our grumblings around the office, the failure of the Mazda6 to triumph over appliance cars is further proof of a bitter and malevolent God.

So now Mazda's bread-and-butter sedan is in its second iteration, and my how it's grown. 6.1 inches longer and 2.3 inches wider than the car it replaces, with 4.5 extra inches between its wheel bearings, the 2009 Mazda6 now follows the same formula that Honda and Toyota twigged to in the nineties: Americans like their cars bigger than other locales. The 6 has been pulled and stretched, growing larger than all of its rivals but the Accord — itself no mighty mite. It may look similar to the refreshed Mazda6 launched on the other five continents last fall, but our version is actually 7.3 inches longer and 1.8 inches wider than its global twin.

Instead of taking the easy way out and stretching the sheetmetal to make our Mazda6 resemble a global version that's swallowed the air hose, the American car was given a wholly new body that plays to its, ahem, generous proportions. The wider fenders roll and curve over their wheel arches, visually slimming down the 6's nose and recalling shades of RX-8. Definition creases arc across the bottoms of the window line, terminating in crystalline LED taillamps. Polished metal trim forms an aluminum corona around the greenhouse. The look is shockingly upscale and restrained for a car whose predecessor looked like it crashed through a Super Autobacs and all the bits inside stuck to it.

Inside, the Mazda6's newfound maturity continues: The old car's interior was awash in black-gloss plastic doing its best to resemble lacquered piano wood. For 2009, the Mazda6 is brimming with broad expanses of textured soft-touch materials. The center console floats above the lower stack, and its red-backlit LCD status bar — small, high-mounted, and bristling with information from every system in the car — is as unreadable here as it's been in other Mazdas past. Gauges are big and legible and light up in familiar Mazda blue-and-reds. The lower console houses rotary climate controls and a start button big enough to be stump-punched by an amputee.

Pressing the button with just my index finger brings the Mazda online. My destination is Decker Canyon Road, California State Road 23, running south from Fillmore to the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Hundreds of feet below the road surface and lined with boulders, poison oak, and the impaled steel hulks of the unfortunate, the inhospitable base of Decker Canyon promises a quick yet exciting end for those who fail to navigate the 75 turns making up the stretch's southern end. There's a sign on the approach to Route 23 warning drivers not to attempt driving the canyon road with a trailer in tow. I ignore it since I'm in a lone Mazda6 sedan. The next sign warns that the speed limit is 25 mph. I ignore that one, too.

Despite its class-leading 273 horsepower and thumping 3.7 liters of displacement, the V-6-powered Mazda6 never feels especially quick. A Nissan Altima 3.5SE on hand for comparison’s sake — down three horsepower on the Mazda and yoked to a CVT — was not only more raucous but more tractable, its sweet VQ engine working within its elastic powerband to slingshot the car out of corners. The V-6 in the 6 also returns only 17 mpg city and 25 highway — the same mileage the EPA says you'll get traipsing down urban roads in a Ford Flex. That could be why Mazda thinks nearly three-quarters of buyers will instead drive home with the base 170-horsepower, 2.5-liter four under their hoods. A bored and stroked version of the old 6's 2.3-liter mill, the 2.5-liter not only bumps mileage up to 21 city and 30 highway, it lops a solid 238 pounds of weight off the front axle — and it's also the only engine in the new 6 that's available with a manual.

Yes, you read that right: The three-pedal Mazda6 V-6, which sold in nearly fractional percentages, has been dropped from the lineup. There was no transmission in the parts bin that would mate up to the Ford-designed 3.7-liter V-6, and all five people who would order one didn't justify the cost. The five-door hatchback and the wagon have both been sent packing, too, leaving the sedan as the sole model in the lineup.

This would be the part of the article where you'd expect me to say that the new Mazda6 is bigger and heavier than the outgoing car, and as such has lost its raison d'être, but I can't because this is the part of the article where the road started getting curvy. Which would also be, appropriately, where the Mazda6's chassis reveals its beguiling genius.

The new Mazda6's larger body shell has had its bending rigidity increased by 39 percent and its torsional rigidity improved 17 percent, the result of sills with wider cross-sections, doubling the number of spot welds used on seams, and adhesive welding of critical joints. High-strength steel now makes up 30 percent of the structure versus the old 6's piddling eight. Attached to that stiffened structure is a carryover of the old car's double-wishbone front suspension, with forged one-piece lower control arms designed to help reduce bump steer versus the old 6's two-piece, double-ball-jointed arms. The rear multilink suspension had its shocks moved out further and positioned nearly vertical to make their damping more effective.

Also carrying over are the previous 6's brakes — 11.8-inch vented front and 11.0-inch solid rears — which sounds like someone in product planning has gone barking mad until the scales are tallied up and it's found that the new 6 packs on only 35 additional pounds for the most common automatic four-cylinder model. The pedal is easy to modulate with pressure rather than travel, and even when the interface begins to go soggy after ten miles of pegging the binders into hard corners, they still stop the car confidently, just with a grab point that has worked its way progressively nearer the floor.

Does the 2009 Mazda6 still do the voodoo that it did before? Damn skippy. The Mazda6 coped with the undulating pavement by digging in and only succumbing to understeer when pushed well beyond what would have sent the average Camry into the ravine. On a series of quick switchbacks, the 6's suspension compresses and releases suddenly and repeatedly, but the car never loses its composure. The hydraulic steering rack, despite a somewhat leisurely 16.2:1 ratio, locks in on-center and allows the meting out of tiny inputs that make setting the car up for a corner fiendishly simple — and once that vector is plotted in, the 6 obediently stays on line. This isn't to say that the Mazda will be sneaking up on canyon-berserking Porsches; there are limits, after all, to how much power a front-drive chassis can slap down through just two contact patches that are also tasked with steering. But after driving the Mazda6 back-to-back with both four- and six-cylinder versions of its Japanese rivals, I feel confident calling the new 6 — competent and conceived as a whole — the most rewarding of the bunch.

So, yes, the 2009 Mazda6 is very much the successor to its namesake, but one that manages to retain the sporting nature of the old car while eliminating the shortcomings that kept utilitarian sedan buyers from signing on with it. By the time you've read this far in, at least five more appliance cars have found their ways into suburban driveways. With Mazda's modest sales goal of 80,000 sales each year for the new 6 — only 20,000 more than the car it replaces — we think siphoning a few of those away won't be too hard.