“If you build it, they will come,” said the weird disembodied voice in 1989 sports film classic, Field of Dreams. While that might be true of fictional baseball fields, the reality in the car market is more like “If you build it, they won’t come, and we’ll lose a load of money because people just want crossovers.” Just ask Mazda about the long-running rumours that it’s planning on launching a rear-wheel drive, six-cylinder saloon car, something potentially previewed by 2017’s gorgeous Vision Coupe concept.
Speaking to Drive, Kohei Shibata, the programme manager for Mazda’s Large Product Group platform, said: “If there are any possibilities, then of course we would like to consider [a six-cylinder rear-drive saloon] as well.
“Journalists always tell me that you should make a sedan, but the marketplace is so small. So if… the people start to buy that kind of vehicle, then that will let us make that vehicle.”
Mazda Vision Coupe concept – side
It’s an answer that’s disappointing but not exactly surprising: Mazda isn’t building a car like this because it doesn’t think there’s any money in it. You can blame that on the endless rise of the crossover, and its total cannibalisation of everything from sports cars to saloons and estates.
Mazda already has a native rear-wheel drive platform, the aforementioned Large Product Group underpinnings, which serve as the basis for the CX-60 and CX-80 crossovers in Europe as well as the CX-70 and CX-90 in other markets.
Mazda Vision Coupe concept – interior
It also has a range of 3.3-litre straight-six engines too, in both diesel and petrol forms, with power currently going as high as 280bhp in the most powerful petrol version.
In theory, then, it would be a comparatively small engineering task to pop a saloon body onto this box of bits, but even then, projected sales are apparently small enough that until people start to buy more saloons, it’s not worth it for the company.
Mazda Vision Coupe concept – rear
It’s a good example of the way that the anger aimed at many car companies these days for neglecting enthusiast-geared cars is a bit misdirected. All that rage around the new Ford Capri should really be aimed at the people who stopped buying affordable sports cars, not at Ford itself.
So, if you want that rather lovely-sounding 3-series rival from Mazda, you’d better hope that people who are able to vote with their wallets and start buying saloons again – otherwise it’ll probably never happen.
