1999 Mazda Protegé ES Isn’t Bigger, but It’s Better

From the November 1998 issue of Car and Driver.

There’s a certain who-cares ano­nymity to the cars in this econobox class. Nobody dreams of winning the Powerball lottery so they can show off a Chevy Cavalier in their driveway, or a Ford Escort or a Nissan Sentra. And in these cheap-gas days, big numbers on the EPA mileage label no longer draw a crowd (remember when they did?). The only shoppers who care about this class now walk straight to the price sticker. Price, quality, and dependability are the impor­tant issues for Protegé buyers, Mazda says. They shop price and they keep shopping across brands until something fits the budget.

Still, a few econoboxes manage to stand out from the blur. The Neon remains a cutie and a lusty performer besides. The Honda Civic is a frisky futurist. And we’ve always liked the Protegé because, well, it just seemed to get all the basics right.

Now Mazda has an all-new Protegé—­new body, new engines, new automatic gearbox—and this one has a shot at celebrity. To start off, it’s a looker. Mazda didn’t try for cute. That’s a perishable con­dition (though you wouldn’t know it from the Neon’s still-spunky shape), and now it’s a crowded corner of the market popu­lated by the roly-poly New Beetle. Rather, it did the hard thing in creating an econobox that actually looks classy. The rather formal profile of this four-door-only body is softened by a smoothly arched roofline and then given character with big taillights and boldly sculptured wheel­-opening flares. The grille has an in-your­-face chrome accent, too, a rich touch you’d expect on a Lincoln Continental or a Mercedes, but which seems utterly extrav­agant on a budgeteer.

The Protegé does something else exceptionally well, something perhaps even more valuable: It fits the driver like a custom suit. Let’s be careful here. Anatomies vary, and we can’t foresee the complaints of every human settling into the driving position of a small car. But our relatively normal-size drivers report some­thing unexpected, maybe even unprecedented—the Protegé doesn’t hurt them anywhere. In most cars, larger ones, too, something about the console, or the under­dash, or the door, rubs on your knee, or your shin, exactly on the part where there’s hardly any meat to pad the bone. The longer you drive, the more irritating it gets. You can forget for a while, but then you notice, and it’s annoying again.

The Protegé is one of the rare cars that didn’t rub us wrong in any way.

It seems to have all its room in useful places. The driver’s seat slides rearward too far for six-footers, and they have ample headroom even with the sunroof.

Mazda did a clever thing with the front­-seat tracks. The inner track is mounted on the side of the tunnel, and the outer one attaches to the side of the sill, leaving a remarkably wide floor space for rear-pas­senger feet. Kneeroom seems unexpectedly generous back there, too, as is the door-opening space for entry and exit.

None of this grabs your attention when you review the official published dimensions. In fact, on the page, the new Protegé differs from the old Protegé by only a few 10ths of an inch in almost every direction, and usually the new car is slightly smaller. Overall length is down 0.8 inch; that’s as earth­shaking as the differences get.

But in fact, everything is new. This is a new body, built in Japan on the Capella platform (that’s a narrow ver­sion of the 626 and not sold in the U.S.). Dimensions, inside and out, are so close to those of the old car that you wouldn’t suspect such a dramatic change of hard­ware, unless you notice the 0.4-inch increase in track width. That’s a big clue to significant structural differences.

In this day of big claims for enhanced body rigidity, Mazda’s improvement over the old Protegé seems minor—22 percent stiffer in bending, 12 percent better in torsion. But on the road, the test car has a rattle-­free, drone-free way about it that’s very pleasing. This car nearly earns the term “hushed” for its silence on impacts, for its lack of powerplant thrash at elevated revs, and for its restrained wind noise at speeds above 80 mph. This is high praise for an econobox.

Mazda says the new body is about 50 pounds heavier than the old one. It has more steel, which works to provide the silence just mentioned, and crash protec­tion. Yet the total weight of the car is down 16 pounds on our scale, due to clever engi­neering in the bolt-ons.

As is typical when crash improvements are made, interior dimensions are frac­tionally smaller in almost every case, but it doesn’t hurt the capacity and comfort of this car in any noticeable way. Trunk space has shrunk, too, by 0.2 cubic foot, but the new shape is so uncontorted—it’s a big box!—and the lift-over is so low, that we think it’s more useful than ever.

The top-of-the-line Protegé, the ES, comes with a larger engine than the lower-­level DX and LX models: 1840 cc and 122 horsepower for the ES; 1598 cc and 105 horsepower for the others (those sold in states adhering to California LEV stan­dards have two less horsepower). Both are twin-cam, 16-valve fours but are based on fundamentally different designs. The ES engine is a newly derived version of the 2.0-liter four that’s standard in the larger 626 sedan.

After driving the small-engine models, the ES feels like a muscle car. It cuts nearly half a second off the 0-to-60 time of the previous-generation ES model—down to 8.4 seconds with the five-speed now—and top-gear acceleration improves even more. The redline is down 500 rpm from before to 6500, and torque is much enhanced. If your budget will stretch to the ES, we think the engine alone is worth the extra cost.

The suspension is similar to that of the previous car, although the parts are dif­ferent, and we found road grip to be iden­tical to that of the last ES we tested, at 0.80 g on the skidpad. The new car has anti-roll bars front and rear and tightly limited roll angles, which add a sporty feel to the handling. The steering effort is rather high, and the on-center feel is wide rather than sharp. As a result, the Protegé feels stable, but it lacks the nippy responsiveness that makes Hondas so enjoyable.

Mazda backtracked to drums for the rear brakes; the previous ES had solid discs. The brake pedal feels better than it did in the last car—firm and fade-free­—but its stopping distance increased by 10 feet to a not-very-good 195 feet from 70 mph.

When it renewed the 626 model, Mazda rather conspicuously removed cer­tain convenience features in an effort to reduce costs. But now the yen is weaker, and we expect Protege prices to drop a few hundred dollars—to $12,500 for the low­-end DX, and to $15,500 for the ES. Better yet, the Protegé will retain a high level of stan­dard equipment. All versions have a tilt­-adjustable steering column, a 60/40 folding rear seat, and three-point belts for all five seating positions. LX and ES models have manual adjusters for cushion height and tilt on the front buckets. This adjustability, combined with firmly sup­portive seats and surroundings that don’t rub your legs wrong, makes the Protegé very satisfying to a wide variety of drivers.

At first, the look of the interior seems aggressively bland. Choose between no­-comment gray and curious adobe brown. The broad expanses are broken up by golf-ball-dimple accents, though, and that’s worth a smile. Then, after a few hours of driving, you begin to notice how the shadows break over the sculptured dashtop, over the driver’s airbag cover, and even around the windshield pillars. As the sun moves to different windows, and as the rays slope lower at day’s end, yet more design subtleties rise to your notice.

There’s a lot more to this Protegé than its econobox stature would suggest.