Mazda CX-3: car review | Martin Love

Loyal, dependable, agile and fast, Mazda's new CX-3 compact crossover has much in common with your pet

Price: 17,595
Top speed: 124mph
0-62mph: 8.7 seconds
MPG: up to 70.6
CO2 emissions: 105g/km2

They say being a parent is all about letting go, and last month we did just that. More than let go, in fact, we gave our boy a great long shove up the M1 - and off into a world of his own. Taking him to university isn't exactly chucking him naked into a loveless void, but that's what it felt like to us. "Out you get, sonny, you're on your own now." But there were upsides to abandoning him in Edinburgh. One was that it gave me 900 miles and 21 hours at the wheel to really get inside the skin of this all-new Mazda CX-3. Another was that when coming home we followed the winding A701 for miles as it snakes alongside the River Tweed to Moffat - the soft rain, purple heather and scree-scarred slopes a perfect backdrop to our melancholic mood.