…or maybe it is, I don’t know. Its sort of classed in with minivans according to certain standards, but just as easily gets dropped in with “wagons” or whatever. In Europe, where actual statistically significant numbers of people buy this sort of thing, it’s known as a compact MPV.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself: I’m talking about this:

It’s a 2013 Mazda 5 Touring edition, and I now own it.

I wasn’t necessarily planning on buying a car this week, but after some conversation this weekend, I started doing some research into replacing our venerable 2005 Pontiac G6, as it was beginning it’s final approach toward 100k on the odometer, which, in the parlance of turn-of-the-century American automobiles, means it would soon be due to start becoming a set of niggling mechanical and electrical issues before long.

My beloved spouse, the primary driver of said Pontiac, was growing weary with it anyway, in part, due to its large rear blind spots, the fact that it’s not particularly efficient or interesting, and frankly, we’ve had it quite a while. Since we went shopping for my current car this past summer, she’s had her eye on neat little foreign hatches, but, given the fact that our kids are not getting any smaller, having two cars you could fit in a hip pocket would threaten to make us a permanent two-cars-to-go-anywhere family. Her thought was that if we’re not going to go small, let’s go big enough to haul the kids plus an extra or two – our kids have friends, and occasionally, we need to haul them around as well. The options, for doing that, though, aren’t very attractive.

Our problem, in a nutshell, is that we really don’t like minivans. We had one once. We hated it. Our obtaining it was largely a compromise decision that neither of us were really ever satisfied with (as we couldn’t find a quality station wagon we could afford). There’s a little bit of “minivans aren’t cool or fun” in there, admittedly, but there are also a lot of more practical reasons for not wanting such a thing: again, we both prefer small, nimble, efficient cars, and the market segment known as “minivans” (which ought to drop the descriptor “mini” from the word) are none of those things: they’re huge, lumbering, inefficient, and expensive behemoths (not unlike their SUV bretheren). And, while they can carry a lot, it’s a constant compromise between people or stuff – you can’t really haul both, as we know from experience.

This thing, however, based on its size (its built on the same platform as the sporty compact, and reliable Mazda 3), is much closer in size to the neat little euro-style hatches we like than to the big giant vans we don’t. It runs on a reasonably efficient four cylinder engine, and is actually 9 inches shorter than the Pontiac sedan we traded in for it (she wants a smaller car? she gets one), and seats six. I think I’ll still end up dealing with some headaches in balancing the people-or-stuff conundrum, but it’s got that nice Mazda handling and cornering, and I can park it in small spaces and won’t have to worry about scraping the ceiling in a parking garage. It’s also available with a six-speed manual transmission, but of course, I couldn’t find one of those in town (though a couple of them did play a part in my price negotiations), and this one has a couple of extra bells and whistles the stickshifts don’t; so, while it’s still a compromise (like pretty much all vehicle purchases are), it’s a bit less of one than we’d be making if we bought a traditional “minivan”.

The thing is, barely anybody else buys these things. there were only four or five of them for sale across the three Mazda dealerships in the metro area. Mazda moves less than 20,000 of these things a year in North America.* It’s barely advertised here. I’d never seen one in the wild until I went to the dealership. However, it’s pretty much the best solution for our particular needs (and oddly, like my little Yaris, is a big seller in Europe), and Mazda’s inability or unwillingness to sell them in this country (most American van buyers go bigger at the Dodge dealer down the street – this one had been on the lot since August without a bite), was helful in securing a very good deal (as was the fact that I had a really good offer on a couple of stickshift versions from an out of town dealership I could play with) that it didn’t make sense to refuse.

Sometimes, my counter-cultural tendencies work to my benefit, especially when it comes to procuring niche-market hipstermobiles, having purchased two of them in the last six months. I’m sure the “oh crap, I have two (rather low) car payments again” nervous breakdown will hit in earnest soon, but I’ll get over it.

I’m still going to call it a wagon*, though. A guy’s gotta have standards.

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* – Compare roughly 18k M5s in the US and Canada in 2013, to over 140,000 Honda Odysseys, 132,000 Toyota Siennas of 160,000 Dodge Grand Caravans for the same period. A tiny drop in the bucket.

**- It’s hard to judge scale in the picture above – it looks rather van-like there. However, I parked it briefly next to a late model Honda Oddessey last night, which made the 5 look miniscule, and made the van classification seem, at least momentarily, laughable.