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Posted by: cobas Aug 10 2009, 01:07 PM

Hyundai almost never sells their cars for MSRP; there's always a rebate. So like your screen capture there shows, the Touring is about $1,500 less than the Mazda 3, give or take a couple of features back and forth (sunroof/moonroof, USB stereo, better engine, etc).

I haven't driven either, but IMO they're just different compromises on the Handling-Practicality scale. Us that hang out here, we like our cars and we like Hyundai but we're gearheads and car enthusiasts first. Many of us would take the Mazda 3 for the fun-to-drive factor over the Touring. (You would, I would, Dave would, Colin and Anton already did, etc). Adding a stereo to the Mazda sounds doable - getting the Touring to handle and accelerate like the Mazda doesn't sound so easy.

With that said, the Touring is significantly larger in cargo volume, it gets 1mpg better, and although the maintenance will cost more, those are defrayed costs. Money today is worth more than money in 4-5 years. IMO, the longer warranty more than offsets those costs, especially since Hyundai's quality is now supposedly much better than Mazda's, at least in the JD Power surveys (both the 3-month one and the 3-year one). I don't know how the Touring and 3s sales compare specifically, but overall Hyundai sells over twice the cars Mazda sells and they seem to know what they're doing lately even if they're not doing us sporty-hatchback fans any favors