Mazda BT 50 Review

The Mazda BT-50 ute is one of the most under-rated utes available today. It deserves to be a lot more popular. Five-star ANCAP safety rating. Six-speed transmissions - both auto and manual. Three-point five tonne tow capacity. More than 450 Newton-metres. And more than a tonne of payload in the back. Only three utes in the market today can actually tick each of those five boxes, and the Mazda BT-50 is one of them.
You’d want all that, wouldn’t you? All that fundamental additional ute goodness? Especially if it costs you less than a Hilux.
The Mazda BT-50 is a great ute. Safe. Capable. Comfortable. It’ll work hard, and play hard as well. You could use the Mazda BT-50 ute as a daily driver. If you’re part of that new ‘suit in a ute’ marketing demographic, it’d look okay next to the boss’s BMW.
But can someone please explain who approved the design of the front end. Someone Japanese, obviously. That’s my biggest problem with the Mazda BT-50 ute. It's ugly. You don’t want to look, but you can’t tear your eyes away.
It’s hard to bend your brain around the Mazda BT-50 ute range. It kicks off at $25 grand for the runt of the litter, with an anorexic 2.2-litre diesel engine. That’s only of interest to fleet buyers on the tightest of budgets. Every other model variant in the Mazda BT-50 ute range gets the crackingly strong 3.2-litre five-cylinder turbodiesel with 147 kilowatts and 470 Newton-metres. So, outstanding performance and great economy are a given across the rest of the range. Acceleration is very impressive, both off the mark, and while you’re overtaking. And the auto transmission integrates beautifully with the 3.2.
There are three Mazda BT-50 body styles: single cab, ‘freestyle cab’ - with a bit of extra space behind, and five-seat dual cab. Freestyle has extra seats in the back, with suicide doors, but these have been formally classified by the UN as a cruel and unusual punishment. In fact they were developed by the CIA at Gitmo - for extreme cases where the thrash metal music and waterboarding proved ineffective.
All body styles come in rear-wheel drive and four-wheel drive. There are three equipment specification levels - XT, XTR and GT - but not all equipment grades are available with all those cab configurations. And there’s two transmissions - six-speed manual and six-speed auto. There’s also a high-riding 2WD version of the Mazda BT-50 ute with extra ground clearance called, intuitively enough, the 4X2 XT Hi-Rider. The range tops out at the dual-cab 4WD GT auto costing early-to-mid $50s. So there’s a Mazda BT-50 for everyone, but you have to navigate the permutational Mazda model maze to find yours. Actually, Mazda’s website makes that pretty easy.
All rounders don’t come much more capable. Here’s a ute - let’s take the dual-cab Mazda BT-50 4WD GT as an example - you can shove more than 1000kg of payload on board. That’s five meat-eating westerners all weighing 100 kilos, sitting in leather seats, with 500kg of payload in the back. And, okay the middle seat’s not that practical - but show me the middle seat that is, in any vehicle.
So, you can take clients to a building site in comparative luxury. At the weekend, you can hook up a three-and-a-half-tonne boat. And on holidays, you can stick the family on board, pack all their stuff and tow a boat, a van, camper trailer, horse float. Whatever. The Mazda BT-50 ute has the capacity to take more stuff than you need on any decent holiday - from a weekend away to becoming a certified, Australia-circumnavigating grey nomad.
You can also successfully poke it at very challenging off-road terrain. “Successfully” meaning you get where you wanted to go, and, importantly, later on, you come back.
There aren’t many vehicles as broadly capable as that.