Mazda 3 2019 had 'no benchmarks', brand claims

Mazda claims that during development of its new-generation version of the Mazda3 small hatch and sedan, the company wasn’t concerned with where it stood against its main competitors.

Kota Beppu, program manager for the new Mazda3, claims the company wasn’t interested in the common practice of benchmarking against rivals - where a manufacturer will buy examples of its closest competitors and measure how its own new car stacks up against like vehicles. In the Mazda3’s case, the Toyota Corolla or VW Golf would be the ones we would expect.

“We had no benchmarks,” Beppu said. “We focused on how people feel and what we should be doing to get a comfortable ride, through a study of our customers.

“This is Mazda development philosophy - our next level should exceed the benchmark,” he said, before describing the act of measuring a new model against the current standard-setters as “very inefficient”.

“Every car company is doing this. When they launch a new model, the next benchmark will surpass it.

“We stopped doing this kind of benchmarking. We set the ideal dynamic performance first, and set that as our target. Same thing applies to NVH as well.

“We have to improve ourselves,” Beppu said.

Hiroyuki Matsumoto, head of Mazda research and development, said the company needs to stay true to what it wants to achieve in the market, and focus less on what other companies are trying to do.

“Mazda has a unique value of driving pleasure,” Matsumoto said. “We need to understand humans, and what is the ideal situation for human beings.

“Rather than doing benchmarking, we thought it’s more important to do the human studies,” he said, referring

Mazda went as far as showing us through a bizarre experiment involving a ‘core strength improving’ orthopedic bobble seat that was bolted into the passenger-side of an old Mazda3 and a new one. The task was to see how much easier it was to balance on the seat, and to Mazda’s credit, I noticed a slight improvement.

Other intriguing development strategies for the new Mazda3 include the study of how humans walk and sit - which the brand attempted to translate to a more natural motion when driving, by adding things like seat base adjustment and specific steering geometry and suspension response.

The brand also went to great lengths to improve the refinement on offer, though we will have to reserve judgment for when we drive the car on Australian coarse-chip roads.

Is it a good idea to ignore your rivals? Tell us what you think in the comments below.