It was not a great car. I mean, it’s a Mazda, so it’s pretty good overall, but it was a vehicle from 2003. That’s the last year Mazda made the 323 before switching to the Mazda3. So, great car all around, except for this particular one, which had gone around more than 200,000 kilometers before we bought it. We dipped into our savings at the time and paid 1200eur for it (so 600eur from each, and that was a lot for us back then), which was a hefty price but, well, every car is more expensive here than in the neighboring countries.

Funny enough, the engine was in great condition. Mazda cars are known workhorses that can take some abuse while they continue to throttle away, and this was no exception. I mean, the engine started leaking oil after the first year, and no mechanic was able to fix it — probably because not many people around here know how to deal with Mazda — except for the ones at the (very expensive) Mazda service center, more than 2 years after the initial leak. Great people, though, and it was worth the price, although the servicing had cost me almost 1/3 of the car’s value.

Now, the biggest issue with the car wasn’t the engine, despite the oil leak. No, the issue was everything else that makes a car, a car. Like, for example, the A/C didn’t work — it could blow wind, but we were never able to make it blow cold wind — and never removed any humidity from inside the car, so whenever it rained in a cold weather, all the windows would get foggy, drastically reducing my visibility while driving.

The electrical part was messed up too: if the passenger unlocked their door, all the locking pins would, for the lack of a better word, “desynchronize”, so I would have to play a mix of Whac-a-mole and Tower of Hanoi until all the pins went down together when locking the driver’s door. This would make a great puzzle for a game, I guess.

Also, only the front doors had electric windows, with the other two using a handle to manually roll them up or down. To this day I don’t understand why they made this particular car this way, because all the windows in our older car — a Nissan Sunny from 1992, which we bought for 700eur because it was badly dented in the front, but otherwise surprisingly functional — were electric.

That older car is another story of its own. I also liked it very much, but it had a plethora of other problems — although, as with the Mazda, the engine was still surprisingly good. But well, apparently, maintaining Japanese cars in a small European country isn’t cheap, so it had to go. That was also the fate of the Mazda, although this one was just sold to other people, unlike the Nissan, which went straight to the scrap yard — a necessary step to properly terminate ownership of old and unrepairable cars, otherwise I would still rack up car taxes

The thing I liked about the Mazda, though, is that… it was fun to drive. I know that’s something car people usually say to justify overspending on unnecessarily luxurious cars, but it’s true. Keep in mind, though, that I don’t have a lot of experience in driving newer cars, so my frame of reference is skewed. I spent most of my life driving late-90s or early-2000s cars, and my daily driver before coming here was a Fiat Uno from 1984, a car just a few years older than me and also with its fair share of stories, including one time when the transmission just… got loose, I guess, and had to be manually reattached from under the car while emergency-parked in a roudabout. More often than not I had to abandon it by the side of the road or street, walk home — sometimes more than 5 km away from where I was — and go back the next day with my father, a mechanic, to fix whatever was wrong.

Fun times.

So, anyway, the Mazda was fun to drive. It was a sedan — and I don’t like sedans, they are way too long and that hampers maneuverability, although the Mazda was shorter than your typical BMW or Mercedes sedans — and wasn’t fast, but the driving wheel had an incredibly precise response, even when the wheels were misaligned and the driving wheel itself was uneven. The gearbox was very good too, being able to quickly change gears, and the best way I can describe it was that the gear lever was “sucked” into place, instead of having to be pushed by force as with the other cars I drove in the past.

The car also was, visually, in pristine condition. The emerald green color — which literally glistened under the sun — helped with that. It was a very gorgeous car that, sadly, was falling apart on the insides, despite its heart still beating strong. The straw that broke the camel’s back was, funny enough, a small-but-important part of the suspension that was splitting and could break at any moment. Since Mazda doesn’t make the 323 anymore, the only way to fix this was to call all the scrap yards in the country to see if someone had 4 parts of the same model, one for each wheel — because this part has to have the same condition in all of the wheels — and then paying a humongous amount of money for a mechanic to disassemble the car’s suspension and change each part. It wasn’t financially viable for us to do all of this, so the car had to go.

In the end, it was traded in for an Opel Meriva B from 2010, probably the newest car I ever drove, disregarding the rentals I had to use a few times. I had to take a loan to pay for the Meriva, something I had never done in my life before and, although I’m happy with it and everything works as intended, it’s still no Mazda, if you know what I mean.

Maybe in the future, after the loan is paid, I might go searching around for another Mazda to buy. I don’t know why, I’m not car-savvy or anything, but I really like their vehicles — except for their urban compact SUVs, a type of car that I hate with a passion — so we’ll see what the future holds. Most Mazda cars are, usually, very well mantained and rarely change hands because most people who buy Mazda not only like the brand, but love the car itself.

That’s probably why, despite the troubles I had to endure, I still miss driving it.