Ask The Best & Brightest: Why Not Buy the $250/Month Mazda?

I have a confession to make: I am experiencing a struggle in my life. Normally, when middle-aged male church musicians say that, they mean they are secretly thinking about visiting a San Francisco bath house and rocking out with certain appendages fully visible. In my case, however, the desire to squeeze myself into something young, tight, and not quite masculine is entirely automotive. I’m talking about the Mazda2, of course.

The Mazda2 holds a title that’s important to me personally, even if it doesn’t exactly cause examples of the model to depart dealership lots with a Saturn V’s worth of force: it’s the lightest, simplest four-passenger small car money can buy. The MINI, Fiesta, and Sonic all outweigh it by a Roseanne Barr or more. Even the new Accent and FIAT 500 can’t quite match it. Hilariously, even the Miata outweighs the 2.

To help shove the littlest Mazda off the floorplans, Mazda is currently offering 0% financing. For five years. That’s right: if you can pay your own sales tax up front, it’s possible to have a new 2 for $233.38 a month. Is it worth doing?

We’ll start with some personal numbers. In the past year, I drove about 56,000 miles that I can document. 41,000 miles of that was in my 2009 Town Car. About 7,000 of it was in my Porsches. The rest was done in rentals. I understand that this kind of mileage is almost impossible to believe, but my daily commute and lunch trips alone account for 103 miles a day.

It occurred to me that I might possibly be able to justify part, or all, of a Mazda2 purchase based on fuel savings alone. Let’s say that I will drive 41,000 miles in the Townie again this year. I’m averaging 22.5 mpg over a variety of driving conditions. That is 1,822 gallons. If fuel averages $3.75, that’s $6,832.50, or $569.35 a month.

I should be able to average 35mpg in the Mazda2 during my commute. I came up with this number by carefully studying a number of well-documented metrics, multiplying by fuel specific weight and volume on seasonally-adjusted conditions, performing differential analysis on certain aspects of combustion-chamber swirl, and then pretty much figuring I could match the EPA highway rating. Replacing the Townie with the Mazda2 entirely would lower my fuel usage by 650 gallons per year. That’s a $2,439 savings, or $203 a month.

Those numbers look encouraging, don’t they? In the real world, however, the Town Car can do things the 2 can’t. It can carry five human beings without causing a fistfight or an incident of frottage, or both. It carries more in the trunk than the 2 does with the seats down, assuming you measure in full-sized Gibson Firebird guitar cases, which don’t fit in a 2 at all. It is invisible to law enforcement officials and it’s easy to drive downtown because I can park it by touch, as they say. (Said method is particularly amusing when, as occasionally happens, the cars ahead of and behind me are both late-model S-Class Benzos.) Most importantly, in bad weather it provides a nice solid ring of steel around my irreplaceable child. So the Town Car can go nowhere.

Nor would I expect the 2 to have the durability of a Panther. If I get fewer than 300,000 miles out of my Signature Limited it will be my own fault. Hell, at 64,000 miles it is still on the original brake pads. We all know that the Town Car will still be pimping when the Mazda2 has been recycled to China.

So the 2 can’t be my only daily driver, but it could be an additional one. I could split the mileage, which would still save me about $100 a month in fuel. Insurance for the 2 should be in the $40/month range, so I would have to come up with an extra $190 a month to have it.

Some of you will have already departed the article to comment about how one should always pay cash for cars, and the millionaire next door, and Dave Ramsey’s Financial Bondage, and so on. I’m not listening. If I had $14,000 just sitting around, I would buy two solid Les Paul reissues and a MESA/Boogie amp to sit with the fourteen LPs and two Boogies I already own. It’s bad enough that I don’t owe any money on my Porkers. I should probably take out some kind of equity loan on them and buy GM stock with it. Anyway. Although the zero-percent money represents a hidden incentive from Mazda, it ain’t like I could take the two grand in cash as an alternative or anything like that. Zero percent or nothing; that’s the deal.

Benefits of adding a Mazda2 to the “fleet”:

• looks cute
• amusing way to get around town
• reduced wear and tear on the TC
• if V. McB departs in a hurry for some reason, could use Mazda2 on first dates with women so I don’t look like an AARP member or Kevin Kline in “The Big Chill”, which are my current options
• if I forget to sell it, could be first car for child

Disadvantages:

• the aforementioned $190 a month, which is a nontrivial amount of money in this economy
• represents seventh car in two-car garage/driveway combo
• does not tow race car, which will annoy me during race season
• somebody from some forum somewhere will see me driving it and post a thread entitled “Baruth is poor now LOLZ”. Actually, move this bullet point up to the list above.
• will spend the next ten years explaining to people that it doesn’t have SKYACTIV, isn’t a hybrid, and can’t be plugged into a wall

Incentives expire September 30. My Mazda2 of choice is a five-speed “Touring” model in Projectile Bile Green. B&B — what say you?