2014 Mazda6 i Touring Edward Loh

摘要

If you flip back to the December 2013 issue and the start of our Mazda6's long-term loan, you'll see that our initial plan was to spend six months in the mid-grade, 6i Touring model, equipped with a six-speed manual transmission, before switching to the higher trim Grand Touring model with a six-speed automatic transmission and more premium goodies-including, we hoped, Mazda's new Skyactiv diesel. The second part of this plan never materialized, because while Mazda has had tremendous success racing its diesel-powered Mazda6 in IMSA's Grand Am series (where it won the GX-class championship), it has yet to bring the production Skyactiv-D diesel engine to the U.S. in anything other than race cars. We didn't let this minor hiccup slow us down; we soldiered on quite happily with the manual Mazda6 and piled on a respectable 24,316 miles before turning it back in.