Welcome Max to the family... Max is a Mazda3 hatchback, with all the standard
options, in black mica paint.
I delayed buying a car for as long as I could,
but now that the weather is cooling and days are becoming short, it is getting
harder to do things like grocery shop by bicycle. Also, this way I can
go to events and client meetings without relying on anybody else to give me
a ride.
The first thing I discovered is that waxing by hand is incredibly hard work.
I used a polymer wax which goes on in thin coatings and should be easier
than real carnauba wax, but it still took me two hours to wash and wax.
And even then, I didn't do a good job. Washing was OK.
Then I dried in the shade with an Absorber
(awesome synthetic chamois) but the water here is so hard and the air so dry I
still got water spots because I couldn't dry the car fast enough.
Also, there are a zillion nooks and crannies secretly holding water, just waiting for
the waxing process to start. When I applied wax, this water would shoot out and
cause streaks.
Not to mention, there are so many curved shapes on the car, its hard to apply
the wax in long, even strokes without hitting the trim or glass. I still have smudges
on my rear window from waxing the spoiler. I'm going to try again next week to
get rid of streaks and smudges, but next time I will go more slowly. I'll also
try to put on a thinner coat so I won't have to work so hard to buff the car.
At least the interior should be easier to take care of. I bought a mini California duster
to pick up dust off the dashboard and seats. I suspect some of the plastics will scuff
easily, but I'm not going to stress about that for now.
The one thing that is kind of annoying is that the speedometer goes up to 220 km/h which
means that the useful range (up to about 120 km/h) isn't even half the dial, and in town
its hard to read how fast you are traveling.
For some reason, Mazda changed the colour of the centre stack from black to dark silver.
Its not bad looking, and it relieves some of the darkness of the interior, but I don't
understand why they love changing the colour of interior trim from year to year. They
did that on the Protege in its later years too, and the change is almost always for
the worse. Luckily, this time the change is rather subtle.
Now I've just got to figure out what to do about parking...
