It’s certainly fair to record that the 6e looks the part: recognisably like a Mazda from without, and neat, smart and stylish enough to stand out in a traffic queue or supermarket car park. Once inside, however, much less looks and feels familiar.
You sit quite high and bent-legged at the wheel, in a position that feels some way from ideal – which is strange in itself from a company that has spent so long refining the driving positions of its cars, and has seldom erred in that respect.
You survey an interior layout that’s very sparsely populated with secondary controls. The column-shifter drive selector wand leaves the centre console almost completely vacant, save for a pair of cupholders and matching wireless phone charging pads. Otherwise, there are no fixed, physical mirror-adjustment, headlight or wiper controls (apart from a wash-wipe button), there’s no manual override for the automatic handbrake and there’s no separate cursor controller for the multimedia display.
This, let’s not forget, from the company that perseveres to this day with separate cursor controllers in other models, and not very long ago even deactivated direct touchscreen control of its multimedia systems entirely while driving in some cases, such was its conviction about the best route to avoid driver distraction. In the 6e – in a volte-face of conspicuous and incriminating proportions – most interaction is carried out directly via your finger on the touchscreen.
It doesn’t take much to call to mind the understated but pervading sense of material quality of, say, a Mazda 3 or CX-30. These cars shunned glitzy, chintzy trims and finishes in favour of really solid-, hefty- and tactile-feeling moulded buttons and switches, and an eerily consistent impression of quality in almost every moulding and grain.
The 6e isn’t from the same world at all. Our lower-tier Takumi model had only synthetic leather seats and matching dashboard upholstery (Takumi Plus cars get nappa leather and suede) but plenty of glossy, satin chrome trims, from steering wheel to door consoles. There’s plenty of glossy black plastic on the car’s steering wheel spokes, too. But none of it stands up to tactile examination very well. The air vents feel flimsy and cheap, other plastics smudgy and wobbly, and nothing strikes you as possessing much in the way of substance.
The glass roof certainly creates a bright and airy ambience, extending as it does all the way behind the heads of rear passengers, although you only get a roller blind for it with Takumi Plus models. Without one, the glass can loom a little too close for comfort to the heads of taller adults.
Boot space under the car’s hatchback rear end doesn’t look like much on paper, at 337 litres to the window line; but the ability to easily load the cargo area to the roof makes all the difference, and will probably give the 6e all the practical space it needs. A useful, quite deep 72-litre frunk is great for separately storing dirty footwear and your charging cable, although Mazda, like so many, forgot to put a remote release for it on the car’s key fob.
Multimedia - 2.5 stars
The layout and structure of the 6e’s 14.6in touchscreen multimedia display reminded us, perhaps inevitably, of the one in the Changan Deepal S07, but didn’t actually impress us as much.
Usability is pretty distracting. Although Mazda claims that the functions on its bottom shortcut bar are driver-selectable, we couldn’t find a way to achieve this. Some ADAS functions can be assigned to a ‘widget’ panel on the home screen, but with not enough choice for our liking.
And so you have to dive quite deeply into the touchscreen menus every time you want to adjust the car’s settings, or disable its more irksome active safety features before every departure. There’s a lot of secondary pressing and scrolling involved. And, although the 6e does have a couple of star-marked shortcut keys on the steering spokes, the choice of functions you can select here is annoyingly slim too – and, unlike the S07, the keys can’t be set separately for short- and long-press operation (which cleverly doubles their usefulness in the 6e’s sister car).
