Mazda 6e - long-term review

There is a method of torture believed to originate in late 15th/early 16th century China in which the victim is restrained, blindfolded and placed beneath a leaking tap. There, droplets of cold water splash monotonously onto their forehead. It perhaps seems innocuous at first, but the incessance of it quickly becomes maddening.

It dominates the victim’s waking thoughts, snapping them back to reality any time their mind wanders, eventually reducing them to a gibbering, nervous wreck - a shadow of their former selves, crippled by panic and anxiety. After a while, it’s not the dripping that torments them - it’s the anticipation.

This is much like the experience of driving the Mazda 6e. Except instead of being strapped into a Chinese-made torture device, slowly losing my sanity while its creators silently monitor my every move, I’m… actually never mind. It’s exactly the same.

Today though, the torturous water drip goes by a different name: Driver Attention Warning. Now look. Like most ADAS systems, this is clearly a worthwhile function, the purpose of which is clear and valid. People should be looking at the road while driving. People shouldn’t be on their phones. People should - at the very least - get beeped at admonishingly when they fail to adhere to this. It’s unarguable stuff.

What irks is when the system sets you up to fail. By, for example, doing away with all physical switchgear, instead moving crucial controls into the iPad mounted on the dash, and then burying them behind a set of menus so opaque that turning your wipers on feels like cracking the Da Vinci code.

Clearly, many modern cars run afoul of this, but the Mazda afouls with the very worst of them. I reference the wipers specifically, due to a recent incident at a car wash. The chap wielding the jetwasher asked me to turn my automatic wipers off, as they were activating when he sprayed the windscreen and splashing soapy water back at him. Since the auto setting had worked just fine for me thus far, I hadn’t accessed the wiper settings before.

They are of course operated via the touchscreen. He waited. I couldn’t find them. Frustrated, he opened my door, reached across me and, giving me his best “You poor, privileged simpleton” smile, twizzled the end of the stalk to the left of the wheel. Alas, the only physical control that resides there is the one that squirts jetwash onto the windscreen, which the automated wipers dutifully collected and rerouted down the back of his trousers. I don’t speak a lick of Romanian but I feel confident his reaction to this was not “Mm, refreshing!”

Clearly this is pants design, and getting beeped at for struggling with, and getting distracted by it while driving is unfair and irksome - but not maddening. No, where the 6e manages to really distinguish itself, the party trick that sees it transcend the annoying and enter the stratosphere of genuinely undriveable, is the attention warning system’s penchant for beeping at you even when you are looking at the road.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve adjusted the seating position and steering wheel to ensure the camera can see me clearly. I’ve tried driving with my eyes forced absurdly wide open, boring two holes into the road ahead like some sort of freakish, giant salamander. Nothing works. Turn it off, you say? Ha. That would require figuring out how. And then remembering how. And then doing it every time I climb back in.

Sometimes there is respite. The 6e occasionally grants me extended periods of reprieve. I think I once enjoyed a whole hour of silence. I remember it fondly. But then I made the mistake of relaxing. I continued looking ahead, but my thoughts began to drift. I started mulling what I might have for dinner later. A song I love played on the radio. Eventually, I forgot why I’d previously felt so tense and angry, and began to wonder if I had treated this car har-BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP.

Dear lord. Three more months of this.