Mazda 6e Review: Price, range and boot space

Mazda 6e: Everything you need to know 

There's an expectation of what a Mazda should feel like to drive. The Japanese firm has long prided itself on making all of its products, not just the Mazda MX-5 sports car, great to drive. Elements such as steering weight and feedback, well-balanced handling and pleasant to use controls that fall in easy reach from the driver's seat. The company seems to be moving away from that with the 6e. 

Even before you set off, alarm bells start to ring when you learn that turning on the windscreen wipers or adjusting the door mirrors requires multiple prods of the massive central touchscreen – it seems very un-Mazda and more Tesla-like (sadly, the company has gone a similar direction with the updated CX-5). And then you drive the 6e and experience its vague steering and suspension that's somehow both floaty and quite uncomfortable. Again, that's not very Mazda.

If you've owned a recent-ish Mazda, then you need to forgo any expectations of the 6e being similar beyond its badging and styling. That's because technically, it's not a 'proper' Mazda, but the product of the firm's joint-venture with Chinese car firm Changan, being based on a model not sold here called the Deepal L07.

The car's already been on sale for a while in China as the Mazda EZ-6, before heading to Europe with additional development to make it more suitable for the market here. It received further tweaks before landing in the UK, including a change of battery pack, but we reckon it could do with a bit more. 

Although it doesn't feel very Mazda-like to drive, it definitely looks like a Mazda. The front end ties in well with Mazda's Kodo design philosophy, although it's less distinctive at the rear, looking more similar to the Deepal it's based on. The interior has a minimalistic design, but it's gone too far with this and the absence of physical controls, as already alluded to, plus the tan suede upholstery option makes a welcome alternative to blacks and dark greys. 

While SUVs dominate the EV space, there are a number of other alternatives to the 6e. The Tesla Model 3 is the most obvious rival, closely followed by the Volkswagen ID.7, but if you're a particularly keen driver, there's the BMW i4 to consider. The Hyundai Ioniq 6 and BYD Seal could also be considered rivals, although they're both saloons rather than hatchbacks. 

How we tested the Mazda 6e

We had an early taste of the 6e with a left-hand drive, continental European-spec example, and more recently, a full UK-spec car with a crucial change of battery pack (see the range section for more information on that). We tried both cars on a variety of roads encompassing busy urban streets, twisting country lanes and motorways.  

Is the Mazda 6e a good car? 

Just about. We really wish it drove a bit better (and more like a Mazda, frankly), and its overreliance on the central touchscreen is a real turn-off. But it's difficult to ignore the range, rapid charging ability and standard equipment you're getting for the price, which is much less than rivals, including some also built in China. It helps that the car is handsome, too. Whether or not all that is enough to offset the car's mixed driving experience and tech frustrations is up to you.

Mazda 6e: Range 

Earlier versions of the 6e sold elsewhere in Europe had a baffling arrangement with two different batteries, with the slightly larger of the pair making do with half the charging capacity of the smaller one. 

Things have been rationalised for the UK, with the 6e coming with a single, completely different battery pack offering the best of both worlds – a long range plus strong rapid charging ability. 

It'll manage 348 miles of range on a full charge according to the WLTP Combined cycle, and our testing suggests you should be able to get quite close to that figure in warmer times of the year. The figure compares favourably with the 332 offered by an entry-level Tesla Model 3 and isn't too far off the 368-mile range of the cheapest Volkswagen ID.7. 

Mazda 6e: Charging

The UK-spec 6e charges at up to 200kW, which gives it an edge over the smaller battery version of the Volkswagen ID.7, which is capped at 175kW. Assuming conditions are optimal and you're plugged into a potent enough public charger, it'll take 24 minutes to take the battery from 10 to 80%.

Recharging at home using a 7.4kW wallbox will take around 10 hours. Charging this way also allows you to take advantage of various energy suppliers' EV-friendly tariffs. Bank on it taking about four times as long using a regular three-pin socket, something that generally isn't recommended for the sake of your home electricity supply's health. 

This brand's approach to making every car in its range drive brilliantly unfortunately ends with the Mazda 6e. You can tell it's a product of its Changang Mazda joint venture, built using a platform sourced from elsewhere, because it doesn't feel anything like any other wholly Mazda-developed car on sale.

The suspension offers a strange mix of being both floaty and wallowy yet also uncomfortable, with the ride never settling down, tackling larger imperfections in the road surface with a particular lack of grace. There's a constant jiggling feeling that just never goes away. 

Drive it quickly, and the Mazda6e soon feels out of its depth in a way that the Volkswagen ID.7 or the BMW i4 simply won't. It always feels as though the car takes a moment or two to react to your inputs. 

Not everyone is interested in driving in a spirited manner, of course, but it's not like the 6e is rewarding to drive sedately and not just because of the ride problems. Refinement at speed is sub-par and the brake pedal is not well-calibrated, with the first part of its travel not doing much at all before the brakes bite sharply. This makes it difficult to smoothly come to a stop. 

Mazda says it further developed the Chinese-market version before bringing it to Europe as the 6e, which begs the question 'how poor was it previously?'. 

Mazda 6e: Batteries and motors

While the 6e was initially launched elsewhere in Europe with two different batteries, the choice of which affected charging tech and power output as well as range, the car is coming to the UK with just the one drive system.

This combines a 78kWh battery pack with a single, rear-mounted motor. The motor develops 258PS, which is comparable to a lot of rival cars, but the torque is curiously low at 290Nm. It's dwarfed by the 545Nm offered by a Volkswagen ID.7. 

The 0-62mph time is respectable enough at 7.3 seconds, though. Sure enough, the Mazda 6e feels brisk enough once it gets going, but that's the issue — the time that takes. There's a frustrating pause between putting your foot down and anything happening, which you need to bear in mind before committing to a modest gap when pulling onto a roundabout or out of a side turning. 

It's slightly more responsive in Sport mode, but the delay is still there. There's also a disconcerting feeling of the car continuing to accelerate for a moment when you lift off the throttle pedal, and although you can remedy this by turning up the brake regeneration, there's no dedicated button for this. Instead, you have to put the Individual driving mode on and fiddle with the settings in there. Most rivals let you play around with this using a set of steering wheel-mounted paddles, but there's no such luck in the 6e.

The Mazda 6e was awarded a full five-star rating by Euro NCAP, with strong scores of 93% for both the adult occupant and child occupant categories. All versions come with nine airbags and plenty of driving assistance systems as standard, including adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assistance, a driver attention monitor, blind-spot monitoring and autonomous emergency braking.

The lane-assistance system on the earlier version we tried wasn’t great, doing nothing at times when you might expect it to, and on other occasions aggressively tugging the steering when misidentifying imperfections in the road surface as lane markings. It also required several steps in the complex infotainment system to turn it off. 

In the updated model coming to the UK, the assistance systems are much better resolved, although the lane assistance does still interfere (albeit with less ‘enthusiasm’) on rural roads, yet often doesn’t seem to do a great deal on more major roads if you are straying over white lines.

The adaptive cruise control system with lane centring is also unrefined in its steering inputs, often over-correcting itself when simply trying to keep the car in the middle of the lane on a straight bit of dual carriageway.

We’d also rather do without the voice that tells you in a quite lengthy fashion that the assistance has been disengaged every single time you indicate to change lanes. It can be turned off, but that’s yet another level of fiddling that’s necessary to ensure driving the 6e isn’t a frustrating experience. You can create a profile with all your preferred safety settings (which might take a while to nail down, because there's a bewildering amount of choice), but it'd be nice if all the systems worked well enough that you don't want to just turn a load of them off. 

Speaking of which, you’ll also want to turn off the navigation’s separate voice announcements, which are constant, even going as far as telling you if there’s an incline you’re about to drive up or down, no matter how shallow. 

The speed limit recognition is frequently wrong, but the warnings themselves are reasonably quiet. The driver attention monitor is one of the better calibrated of the Chinese-built cars we’ve tried lately, giving some much-needed leeway in a car that requires quite a bit of staring at its touchscreen to operate

Both versions of the Mazda 6e are rated to tow braked trailer loads of up to 1500kg.

That's similar to the Volkswagen ID.7 and the BMW i4, as well as being better than the 1000kg maximum of the Tesla Model 3. 

The Mazda 6e's 466-litre boot is small compared with the Volkswagen ID.7's 532-litre load space but it's not far off what you get in a BMW i4. You also get something not available in either — a storage area under the bonnet, or a frunk if you don't mind the Americanism. It offers 72 litres of storage space and has a drain plug at the bottom, so you can chuck wet charging cables in it and not worry about water accumulating.

Like the i4 and ID.7, the 6e is a five-door car with a tailgate to access the boot. It's an arrangement that proves more practical than the saloon-style separate boot lid arrangement found on the Hyundai Ioniq 6. Usefully, the Mazda's load space isn't compromised by the rear suspension intruding into the sides of the boot, as seen in the BMW i4.

The Mazda's folding rear bench seat only folds in a 60/40-split when 40/20/40 is the norm for other cars of this size. When folded, the total volume is 1074 litres.

Rear legroom is very generous, and headroom is decent, but the floor is high, which could make longer journeys uncomfortable for any taller passengers back there. 

Mazda 6e: Dimensions 

The 6e is 4921mm long, 1,890mm wide (excluding door mirrors), and 1485mm tall. This makes it marginally longer and wider than a Volkswagen ID.7, but slightly lower. 

Throughout our initial drive, there was a persistent but, thankfully, fairly muted rattle coming from somewhere further back in the cabin, which didn't fill us with confidence about the Mazda 6e's build quality. We didn't have any such issue when we revisited a UK-spec model more recently, though. 

More immediate surroundings appear to be made from decent enough materials, but how well that suede-like fabric will wear over the miles is an unknown at this early stage. 

All versions of the Mazda 6e come with a 14.6-inch touchscreen infotainment system. It has more of a feel of a tablet than a system specifically designed for a car, with a bewildering array of applications and many submenus.

Mazda has been lauded for resisting the trend of integrating climate control functions within its infotainment screen, instead keeping physical buttons from them, but that's unfortunately changed with the 6e and the updated CX-5. 

You need to use its screen for many more functions, including controlling the headlights, the door mirror adjustments and even the windscreen wipers. Such nonsense should be left to Tesla — it makes for an annoying and distracting time from behind the wheel. At least the screen quickly responds to touch, but ideally, it should be used a lot less on the move than you're forced to. 

We also experienced issues when connecting a phone to Android Auto on our first drive of the car, with the system telling us every few minutes that the battery on the device was running low, despite being at over 70% at all times and placed on the car's own wireless charging pad. Thankfully, this issue was not present when we tested the car more recently with Apple CarPlay enabled. 

In better news, the 14-speaker Sony sound system is decent, although the exterior speaker behind the front bumper is an odd choice. 

To the side of the infotainment screen is a 10.2-inch digital instrument cluster, which is nothing particularly special in terms of graphical features, and like so many other Chinese-made cars, it loses a large portion in the middle to a needless digital representation of the road ahead and the cars being picked up by the 6e's various sensors. You know, the sort of thing you can see with your eyes if you look out the windscreen. Displaying electrical energy consumption in Wh/mi rather than the more usual mi/kWh is another odd choice. 

These are the latest On The Road (OTR) prices for the new Mazda 6e as of June 2026 – prices can change, so please use these as a guide before checking Mazda's latest price lists. 

Is the Mazda 6e good value compared to rivals?

The 6e looks like very good value when it's more like £51,000 for the entry-level Volkswagen ID.7 and upwards of £47,000 for the Hyundai Ioniq 6. The 6e even undercuts the also-Chinese-built BYD Seal by a good few thousand pounds. It's not like Mazda has skimped on the specs, either, while the range is competitive with those much more expensive rivals. 

All EVs are now subject to the same Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) as combustion-engined cars, meaning the Mazda 6e will be liable for the same £200 a year bill.

The 6e has the potential to be a very cheap car to run, so long as you can charge at home as much as possible and get yourself onto a flexible EV tariff and time your plug-in sessions accordingly. If you're on a standard tariff paying the national average, it will cost just under £20 to fully charge the 6e from empty.

Offsetting this will be potentially high insurance costs, with the 6e sitting in a relatively high group 44 out of 50. The Volkswagen ID.7, for comparison, occupies groups 38 to 42. 

The Mazda 6e is available in two trim grades called Takumi and Takumi Plus.

The Mazda 6e Takumi comes with the following equipment as standard:

• 19-inch alloy wheels 
• Electrically operated tailgate 
• Heated and electrically adjustable door mirrors 
• Faux leather trim
• Panoramic roof
• 360-degree camera system
• Keyless entry
• 64-colour interior ambient lighting system
• 10.2-inch digital instrument cluster 
• 14.6-inch touchscreen infotainment system
• Faux leather-wrapped steering wheel
• 14-speaker Sony audio system
• Wireless Apple CarPlay/Android Auto connectivity
• Adaptive cruise control

Upgrading to the Mazda 6e Takumi Plus builds on the above with:

• Tan Nappa leather and suede trim
• Electric sunshade