My brother in law went with the Mazda 3 but I haven't had a chance to see how well he likes it. I test drove a MazdaSpeed6 before getting the Mini and it was nice but there just seemed to be something off about it. Being a turbo it was powerful but it had WWWAAAYYY too much body roll and there were small tweaky things with the interior that got on my nerves. I can't remember exactly what it was but there was something with 2 LCD's on the dash. They were both "redish" but were different technologies (LCD vs VFD or something) and looked completely different from each other. It wouldn't have cost that much more money to make them the same type of LCD but Mazda went the cheap route and it just didn't flow right for me.

Yeah, the differencial LCD bit did get to me a bit... but when comparing the pro's with con's it didn't make it very far up the list.

Thanks for the info... if you get a chance to talk to your brother-in-law, let me know what he thinks...
_________________
I am ZondorTheCondor!