Mazda6e Hatchback (2026 - ) Electric review

We don’t have any official UK prices for the Mazda6e as they will be confirmed closer to its arrival here next summer. However, expect it to start in the region of £40,000 and you'll get a lot of mod-cons for your money. Overall running costs will be kept down if you can charge at home and our 68.8kWh standard range test car was averaging over 4 miles/kWh which should help limit the need to top-up using expensive public chargers. Meanwhile, company car drivers will gain the usual Benefit In Kind incentives.

The Mazda6e is a new model, so we don’t yet know how reliable it will be. Sold as the Mazda EZ-6 in China, the Mazda6e shares its foundations with with Changan’s Deepal SL03, which is a relatively new model too. However, you can take reassurance that the Mazda6e is an electric car which means it has fewer mechanical parts to go wrong than petrol or diesel equivalents. Also, you’ll be covered by Mazda’s industry standard three-year warranty. This is not as generous as the seven years you’ll get from Kia, MG or Omoda, but it can be extended for an extra fee. Meanwhile, the battery gets its own eight years of cover for extra peace of mind.

The Mazda6e is fitted with nine airbags so you’ll be protected should the worst happen, and you’ll get a host of driver aids as standard. These include emergency braking, blind spot monitoring, cross traffic alerting to prevent you reversing into oncoming traffic, lane keeping assistance and adaptive cruise control. We found the systems lacked refinement, with the steering assistance often being overly intrusive and bouncing you from one white line to another. Mazda was one of the last brands to hold out on physical controls as it believed turning a dial or pressing a button was safer whilst driving than digging through touch-screen menus – this was one of the reasons we loved the brand so much. Yet, now, Mazda has gone the way of Tesla, BYD and even Volvo, U-turning on its principles like a politician in a pickle. The central touch-screen controls everything from the headlights to the heating and you'll even need it for the windscreen wipers unless you dedicate them to one of the steering wheel shortcut buttons. Meanwhile, the car scolds you whenever you are forced to look away from the road. We can’t help thinking it would be safer to simply have more physical buttons.

Mazda says it designed the interior around the Japanese philosophy of ‘ma’ which is based on the beauty of empty space. While Mazda clearly had no say in the layout – have a look at the Deepal SL03 and you’ll know what we mean – the inside of the Mazda6e it is light and airy thanks to a large panoramic glass roof. There’s a lovely mix of plush materials which do feel very Mazda. The Takumi trim comes with your choice of beige or black artificial leather upholstery, while Takumi Plus gets the Tan Nappa leather and suede we had in our test car. The seats are nice and supportive, but the ride was on the firmer side, and we expect things could feel rather choppy on our rough British roads. In the back legroom is decent, but the flat floor is very high, so your knees are bent in a slightly uncomfortable position. Similarly, headroom is compromised by the sloping roof line and taller passengers will be brushing the ceiling. Meanwhile, the boot is a decent size, and you get a large front storage space (or frunk) which is big enough for cables or a small suitcase.

The 14-inch central touch-screen is the dominant feature of the Mazda6e. This is where everything from the heating to the wing mirror positioning is controlled. It’s pretty fiddly, with things like changing the heating requiring several presses and swipes. To help make life easier there is a built-in virtual assistant, although it didn’t reliably acquiesce to our requests and we’re not convinced by the gesture controls - which you can apparently use to take a selfie with the built-in camera - either. Mazda did say the cars we were driving were “pilot-production vehicles” implying more updates to follow, but it seems Changan has only given Mazda its first-generation software and it felt leagues away from BYD’s voice recognition tech. In addition to the main screen the driver also gets a head-up display and a 10.2-inch instrument cluster. While we appreciate having information in our line of sight, we are not sure why the graphics are so small and why, like the Omoda E5, most of the screen is devoted to a mountainscape. This aside, you do also get useful features such as wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, wireless phone charging, keyless entry and a powered tailgate.

The Mazda6e is rear-wheel drive, has a near 50:50 weight distribution and Mazda says it has applied its ‘jinba ittai’ driver and car in unity philosophy – it all sounds promising on paper. Mazda didn’t tell us what changes, if any, it had implemented to make the Mazda6e different from its Chinese cousin, but the power delivery is smooth and predictable rather than the all-or-nothing aggressive acceleration you get in a Tesla Model 3. There are three driving modes – Normal, Sport and Individual – and you can cycle through them using a steering wheel shortcut. In Normal or Sport mode you get what you’re given in terms of the amount of regenerative braking, the steering feel and the car’s responsiveness, but you can choose your own combination in Individual mode by using the touchscreen. We can’t help but miss the MX-30’s paddles behind the steering wheel which make it much quicker and easier to adjust the braking as required. There will be two versions of the Mazda6e available: a standard range and a long-range version. The former has 258 horsepower and uses a 68.8kWh battery to give an official range of just under 300 miles, while the latter has 245 horsepower uses an 80kWh battery to provide a range of 343 miles. The standard car charges from 10 to 80 per cent in around 24 minutes rapid charger but the long-range model takes twice as long, and you don’t get many more miles between charges, so we'd save a few pennies and go for the model with the smaller battery.