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Here I am, snaking through the famed Ortega Highway in Southern California in a Mazda, attacking every apex and rowing through the crisp six-speed manual’s gears with an ear-to-ear grin.  Only I’m not driving a Miata or RX-8.  I’m driving a friggin’ minivan.

Now in its second generation, the Mazda5 continues to occupy a unique niche in the marketplace (and will likely continue to do so for the time being now that Ford has canceled plans to bring the conceptually similar European C-Max seven-seater to the U.S.).  Launched earlier this year as a 2012 model, the new Mazda5 doesn’t stray much from the template established by its predecessor, but for the right kind of family, that’s fine and dandy.
That means that the 2012 Mazda5 is a minivan in miniature, offering dual sliding doors and three rows of seats but occupying a footprint scarcely larger than the compact Mazda3 it’s based on.  As such, it’s space efficient and functional, but lo and behold, it’s actually a blast to drive.

No, it’s not particularly fast (although the 157HP 2.5L four-cylinder is smooth and has a sporty snarl at higher revs), but like any Mazda should, it handles with enthusiasm and steers with precision.  The little minivan’s sporty character is further enhanced by our tester’s six-speed manual transmission, notable for its precise shifter and clutch action.  Sure, they won’t sell a whole lot of these with the three pedal setup, but the mere fact that it’s available speaks volumes about the car’s character.  I absolutely love that it’s available.

A tiny minivan that drives like a sports sedan sounds great to enthusiasts like me, but how does it work as a minivan?  Let’s get this out of the way: it’s not an alternative to full-size minivans, and if you have a large family, you’d best look elsewhere.  Rather, this is an an ideal vehicle for a small family with one or two kids.  The large sliding doors make for unrivaled ingress and egress for a vehicle of this size, and with the tiny third row folded down, cargo room is absolutely cavernous.  We easily accomplished a trip to the grocery store and Costco, with our rather large stroller sharing space with very full grocery bags.  And the second row bucket seats, slid all the way back on their tracks, have tremendous leg room too.  Those second row’s seat cushions flip up too, revealing storage space for odds and ends.  Very neat.

So, it will carry four people and a lot of cargo very ably.  Deploy the third row, however, and most of the vast cargo space disappears.  Furthermore, room in the fifth and sixth seating positions is scarce and best thought of as emergency occasional use seating.  Still, it’s nice to know you can carry six people should the need arise.

Many families with one or two kids assume that they need a full-size minivan or SUV to get around town.  They really don’t; the Mazda5 is shockingly space efficient for up to four people, and gets fuel economy more like a mid-size sedan than a minivan or SUV.  Ours averaged 25 mpg in mixed city and highway driving.  Oh, and the price is definitely worth a mention.  The Mazda5 represents excellent value; our basic Sport model with the manual transmission had an MSRP of $20,040 and definitely wasn’t lacking in equipment.  All this fun and space for so little coin!

Frankly the Mazda5 is a fun vehicle to drive whether you have a family or not.  Of course, given its minivan looks, we can’t actually envision singles buying them, but the car does prove that vehicles designed for maximum utility can be a joy to drive.