Is All Wheel Drive Possible???

With the news that has come out in the past few weeks about the next Mazdaspeed 3 and it being AWD.  Takeo Mariuchi, the program deputy manager was quoted as saying “from a technical point of view it’s not difficult to install a four wheel drive system” for the next version.  I took this as a non-committal response from Takeo to answer someone’s question.  But in the interest of wanting to see a AWD Mazdaspeed 3 myself, I decided to take a look at the CorkSport 2014 Mazda 3 when it was up on a lift this week.

Checking out the rear knuckles you can see they are open in the middle which would make adapting rear axles to be pretty straight forward.

I took a peak at the rear suspension of the CorkSport Cx5 as well and it is setup the same.  The next point which would have to be addressed is space for the driveshaft and transfer case for an AWD system.

Sure enough there is a larger amount of space at the back of the engine bay to clear a transfer case and drive shaft.  The exhaust manifold looks to be the same from the CX5 AWD to give the clearance for needed systems.

In my opinion, the only thing standing in the way of this getting the green light is the bean counters looking at the past sales of AWD performance cars for Mazda.  In North America, the 323GTX didn’t sell too well and the 06-07 Mazdaspeed 6 was not the biggest sales success either.  Let’s hope they overlook those and give us enthusiasts the car we have always wanted.

-Derrick