√Mazda committed to passenger cars in Australia despite SUV and ute boom

The Japanese brand’s local boss believes traditional family cars have a future on Australian roads.

Mazda Australia has reaffirmed its commitment to passenger cars despite the gradual sales decline of traditional cars in favour of high-riding SUVs and dual-cab utes.

Mazda Australia managing director, Vinesh Bhindi, told Drive as long as Mazda continued to manufacture passenger cars, Australia would remain a key market.

“From our point of view, if there is a market and if Mazda is producing passenger cars, we will absolutely either have them or we will definitely consider it,” Bhindi told Drive.

In 2021, sales of Mazda passenger cars accounted for just 20 per cent of the brand’s total, the remainder made up of SUVs and dual-cab utes. From a total of 101,119 in 2021, passenger cars racked up 20,544 sales.

The Mazda CX-5 continues to be the brand’s biggest seller in Australia

The Mazda 3 proved the most popular with sales of 14,126 while Mazda 2 accounted for a further 4183 sales. Mazda’s mid-size ‘6’ sedan saw a 13.7 per cent decline year-on-year, with sales of just 1491 for the 2021 calendar year.

However, despite shrinking market share and the proliferation of SUVs on our roads, Bhindi believed there remained a future for traditional passenger cars.

“I don’t think passenger cars are just going to disappear and everything will be SUVs,” he said. “[The market] will be smaller… if you consider Mazda 6, that segment was huge in one era and now it’s small. But, we still have [an] offering in [the segment] and we still have a lot of variants available.”

Bhindi also iterated that Mazda Australia remained committed to its mid-size Mazda 6, despite uncertainty surrounding its future globally.

The Mazda BT-50 ute trails only the CX-5 in local sales for the Japanese brand

“We intend to keep it in the current form that you see as Mazda 6,” he told Drive. “There could be updates… we’re planning to continue bringing that nameplate in.”

In Australia, sales of SUVs outnumber those of passenger cars by a factor of almost three-to-one according to data released by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries.

In 2021, Australians bought a total of 531,700 SUVs against 221,556 passenger cars. Light commercial vehicles, which includes the ever-popular ute segment, accounted for a further 253,254 sales in 2021, lifting total market share of the dominant segments to almost 75 per cent.

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