2002 Mazda Protege5 and MP3...continued

It is important for an economy car to get accepted by the trendy opinion shapers on the West Coast, and ProtŽgŽ is getting on the radar screen of Hispanics and Asian youths. The limited edition MP3 addresses their needs with expressive bodywork, oversize wheels, grippy tires, and two flashy colors. The vibrant yellow offsets the electric blue, and both are bound to be festooned with wild graphics in a lot of communities.

While Mazda's excellent multi-valve engine doesn't need much, a Racing Beat exhaust system and a little computer chip tuning adds ten hp. Don't be surprised if some of those past (and future) Mazda rotary engines find their way under the hood.

But the heart of the car is the Kenwood sound system, complete with a flashy graphical display, but more importantly incorporating the MP3 digitizing system that gives the car its name and instant recognition with youth. Here's where the generation gap comes to play, with youngsters downloading music over the Internet and storing it on CD's with ten times the density of normal music disks. The system in the MP3 will allow you to drive around town all day and all evening and not hear the same song twice.

This is a first step toward being able to download programming from satellites, avoiding commercials and selecting specific listening formats. We won't have to wait long.

Kenwood has solved another frustration in modern sound systems with the control units festooned with small and poorly marked buttons. They use a remote control to augment the multiplexed dash buttons, an easy and familiar way to resolve the issue. And the remote is inexpensive enough to have a spare to offset the inevitable lost and dead units.

Warning! There only were 1500 MP3s built and they will be gone soon. Get the hither to yon Mazda store before they realize what they have.

Mazda USA president Charlie Hughes was responsible for bringing Land Rover to the US and states the obvious, "What Mazda does the best is how a car feels and runs. The interface between a driver and the car is something that cannot be defined and is frequently sought but seldom achieved. Yet it can be defined by the smile on a driver's face."

The company is proud of having quashed the frequently more expensive competition in magazine shootouts, and while many others are getting larger and more soft, Mazda keeps the edge promised in the Zoom Zoom campaign.