It's one of those brilliant Los Angeles days that make East Coasters buy one-way flights. I'm bending the 2019 Mazda 3 into sweeper after sweeper, zipping along the Angeles Crest Highway. And I can't stop thinking about pelvises.

That's not to say I'm distracted. The 3 is positively charming on these roads. It's light and lithe, bounding along with a sure-footedness you'd never expect from an affordable economy sedan. It's planted in corners, compliant over choppy pavement. It's got an intuitiveness you wish more sports cars had.

According to Mazda, in order to understand how this little sedan pulls it off, you have to go back to fundamental mechanics—not of the automobile, but of the human body. And the foundation of human posture: The pelvis. As far-fetched as that sounds, once you get behind the wheel of the new 3, it all makes sense.

"The basic concept of what we're always trying to do with jinba ittai is making the car feel completely natural," Dave Coleman, Development Vehicle Engineer at Mazda, told me. That Japanese phrase, well known to Miata fans, roughly translates to horse and rider as one. With the new 3, Mazda redesigned the horse to better interact with the rider's natural capabilities.

It's got to do with head motion. When walking, running, or just sitting upright, you're constantly adjusting your posture to keep your noggin level and balanced. It's a complex effort, made even more impressive by the fact that it's unconscious: The muscles in your neck, shoulders, pelvis and core are all constantly at work keeping your head hovering over your center of gravity. Put your hands on your hips, feel how they counterbalance your shoulders as you walk. It's a natural habit so powerful, you might have never appreciated it before.

Your body can even do it while you're riding in a car, muscles finely shifting to keep you even-keeled against g-forces. But it's easy to overwhelm that balance system with motions that are too sudden, or that come from too many directions at once. That's why your head gets tossed around as you drive down a rough road, or ride shotgun with a klutzy driver.

Mazda wanted to minimize that head-toss in the new 3. "We use some very critical words in our engineering," Kelvin Hiraishi, Director of R&D Engineering at Mazda, told me. "Terms like controllability, linearity, directness, smoothness ... these are engineering terms that we use. Our specification is not 200 horsepower, 500 horsepower. Our specifications are these words."

The new 3 is the first clean-sheet Mazda designed with these goals. "We started studying passengers' bodies in different cars, driving over bumps to see what they were doing," Coleman told me. "You can see that if the neck moves a lot, something wasn't right in their subconscious balance process."

As Coleman explained, the new 3's chassis motions—the roll, pitch and dive as the car drives along—were tuned to match the frequency of human motion. The seats cradle your pelvis, coaxing your upper body into a natural posture. Thus, when the car's body moves in a corner or over rough roads, you're poised to balance against it.

Out on the serpentine mountain roads north of LA, you can feel that strategy at work. Toss the 3 into a bend, and the car settles gently into a steady cornering posture. There's a touch of body roll, but it comes on gradually. Pay close enough attention, and you'll start to notice how your body counteracts every dive, squat and roll as you hustle along. You pivot gently from your torso, as natural and subconscious as walking. It's a wholly different experience from what you get in a dedicated sports car, where huge grip and NASA-grade seat bolsters leave it up to your neck muscles alone to keep your head from toppling. The Mazda's approach is refreshing, far less taxing, and just as fun.

The 3's trick is this: Honest, clear feedback without punishment. The steering is nicely weighted without being artificially firm, and surprisingly talkative. Mazda's G-Vectoring system is standard, minutely reducing engine output during throttle-on turn-in to help shift weight to the nose. It's not something you can consciously detect—the system operates in 50-millisecond increments—and you can't switch it off to see how the car handles without it. I can't tell you how much of the car's sharp steering response is the result of G-Vectoring. All I can say is that the car dives into turns and feels immediately settled, requiring hardly any throttle or steering adjustment to hold a steady arc.

The same philosophy is apparent with the brakes. Mazda blessed the new 3 with a delightfully firm, stalwartly linear brake pedal. Most modern cars have some sort of braking quirk that takes a few dozen miles to get used to—either too grabby or too mushy in the first inch. No such weirdness in the Mazda. Even the brake dive is tuned to the human body. Your brain naturally stabilizes your vision as you walk, filtering out the bobbing motion of your head. The maximum brake dive on the new Mazda 3 is tuned to mimic that head-bobbing motion; on threshold braking, you feel the car moving underneath you, but it doesn't distort your vision. You'd happily pay good money to get this steering and these brakes in a dedicated sports coupe.

As for rough-road driving, Mazda paid particular attention to the inputs the car delivers to your body, and how your body reacts to them. Typically, when you drive over a bump, you experience two motions: deceleration, then a vertical jerk. At speed, those motions are nearly simultaneous, too close together for our bodies to process—we're still bracing against the deceleration when the vertical impulse occurs. The result: More of that dreaded head-toss.

Mazda designed the 3's suspension to minimize the number of motions you feel. If, instead of a deceleration followed by a vertical jounce, your body detects one single, clean, diagonal force, it's much easier for your balance system to subconsciously counteract it. The automaker chose tires with a softer sidewall that deforms a bit to transmit bumps more gradually. Stiffer suspension bushings eliminate unwanted deflection, ensuring that road imperfections don't jostle the passengers.

That desire for clean, simple suspension inputs led Mazda to take what seems like a technological step backwards: The new car has a simple torsion beam rear suspension where previous 3 had a multilink independent setup. According to Coleman, the torsion beam isn't a downgrade.

"In the macro scale, there's an advantage to multilink," Coleman told me. "But in terms of precise control [...] it just gets too hard to make that clean input that we're looking for." The last-gen 3's rear suspension had seven bushings per side, Coleman explained; the new torsion beam setup has just one. Fewer bushings means fewer squirming motions, and therefore, fewer competing forces being transmitted to the passengers. Another benefit: The torsion-beam setup minimizes compliance-steer, eliminating rear wheel toe-in under cornering loads. The new 3's rear suspension may be a simple design, but it helps the car get settled more quickly in turns, with fewer mid-corner adjustments needed.

This isn't a floaty luxury machine. You'll know when you've hit a pothole. But Mazda's hocus-pocus about how your body reacts to suspension inputs seems to bear out: You feel big bumps, but in the 3 they don't disrupt you like they would in other vehicles. That's the payoff from all this obsession over head-toss. Mazda played journalists a side-by-side video, camera in the passenger seat looking at a driver in side profile, as he drove over the same speedbump in old and new 3s. In the old car, he looked like he was momentarily head-bashing to some heavy metal; in the new car, his head barely budged.

The only models Mazda brought to this event were front-drive, top-tier Premium sedans with the six-speed automatic transmission and the 2.5-liter Skyactiv-G naturally-aspirated four-cylinder gas engine; hatchback models, optional all-wheel drive, and Mazda's revolutionary Skyactiv-X compression-ignition gasoline engine will come later. A six-speed manual will be available, but only on top-spec hatchbacks with the 2.5-liter engine and front-wheel drive.

That 2.5-liter isn't what you'd call fast—with 186 horsepower at 6000 rpm and 186 lb-ft of torque at 4000, expect 0-60 times in the mid-eight-second range. But the throttle response is crisp in a way no turbo engine can match, supremely easy to modulate mid-corner. There's more Mazda human-centric design here, too. Whether you're walking, running, or doing any other physical activity, "no matter how quick an input you're making, you're always going to have a certain acceleration profile based on the way muscles work," Coleman explained. You've got the same acceleration profile in your neck muscles, which allows you to stay balanced. Mazda tuned the 3's throttle response to that same profile, so the car's transition from deceleration to acceleration never unsettles you.

There's a Sport Mode toggle on the 3's console. It serves as a tidy metaphor for the car as a whole. The only thing that changes when you select Sport Mode is the shifting strategy of the automatic gearbox—it'll downshift gleefully on heavy braking and hold a gear through a corner to keep you in the entertaining 4000-6000 range on the tach. The toggle switch doesn't change anything else about the car, because it doesn't have to: The chassis, the throttle response, the steering, everything is already conducive to sporty driving in its natural state.

In a weird way, the new Mazda reminds me of another 3: Tesla's midsize sedan. Both the Model 3 and the Mazda 3 share a bone-deep sportiness that doesn't come from sticky tires, peaky horsepower, or concrete dampers. They're both delightfully tossable and genuinely communicative because of how they were designed, not because of hot-rod add-ons. This kind of natural, uncontrived joyfulness used to be the main reason people bought yet another 3—the one from BMW.

Getting this kind of simple, well-engineered feedback from any type of vehicle feels like a victory in an automotive world increasingly dominated by artifice. Capturing it in a compact sedan that starts at $21,000—or $27,000 for the leathered, sunroofed, Bose-stereo'd version you see here—seems like downright theft. Your pelvis will thank you.

When Mazda put the new, beautiful Mazda3 on its stand at last year's L.A. Auto Show, it didn't take long before someone asked about a Mazdaspeed3. It took even less time for the Japanese automaker's new global boss, Akira Marumoto, to cite his company's small size and say, "[My] answer would be no." During first drives of the compact hatch last month, Road & Track asked Mazda development vehicle engineer Dave Coleman what Mazda would need in order to resurrect an MPS version. Coleman detailed a few reasons for the Mazdaspeed's continued hiatus, the prohibitive cost foremost. But another hitch is that the Mazdaspeed we'd get now isn't the Mazdaspeed enthusiasts would want.

Coleman told the magazine, "If we had an engine on the shelf that would fit that properly, then we could talk." But the price to develop an engine and supporting hardware to do the car right isn't in the budget for an automaker of Mazda's size.

Perhaps more important, though, present-day Mazda wouldn't — and couldn't — whip up another raw, rapid hatch. The competition, and consumers, have changed. "Even the Mazdaspeed 3, in its last iteration, came out as raw as it did due to the constraints," Coleman said, and today's market won't put up with that kind of buzzy, excitable uncouth anymore. The question is, even if Mazda had the money, do the buyers pining for a zoom-zoomier Mazda3 want the mature, composed hot hatch they'd be offered?

Head over to Road & Track to read Coleman's take on the matter, and how he lays out the gap that would swallow any potential MPS as, "What you think you want is rawness. What you really want is responsiveness and directness."

"If we had an engine on the shelf that would fit that properly, then we could talk." But the price to develop an engine and supporting hardware to do the car right isn't in the budget for an automaker of Mazda's size.

When Mazda debuted the 2019 Mazda 3 at the Los Angeles Auto Show last year, Motor Trend reported that the company’s new Skyactiv-X engine with Spark Controlled Compression Ignition technology would go to countries with stricter emissions rules first, and the U.S. market would get it later. Now it seems we finally have an idea of the performance of the engine, at least in some markets.

According to a spec sheet from Mazda of Slovakia, which you can view here, the Skyactiv-X engine will put down 181 metric horsepower, which converts to roughly 178.5 mechanical HP, and 222 nm of torque, or roughly 163.7 lb-ft of torque.

The documents don’t give any indication of displacement for the engine, but the Skyactiv-X prototype we drove back in 2017 was a 2.0-liter.

Compare the figures above with the 2.0-liter Skyactiv-G engine in the outgoing Mazda 3, which produces 155 HP and 150 lb-ft, and the 2019 Mazda 3 with the 2.5-liter Skyactiv-G, which makes 186 HP and 186 lb-ft of torque.

According to internal Mazda documents sent by Jalopnik by an anonymous tipster, the Skyactiv-X will be offered on the higher GT and GT Plus trims with manual and automatic transmissions both available. The option of all-wheel drive will only be available on hatchback models.

The documents say the Skyactiv-G and diesel Skyactiv-D engines will be available in May and the Skyactiv-X will be available in June. (No word on whether diesel-averse America will get the Skyactiv-D or not; the CX-5 crossover has that as an option now but it’s not that great in terms of fuel economy.)

We’ve reached out to Mazda for confirmation on these details and we’ll let you know if we find out anything else.

Keep in mind Europe is a much different market than ours, so any configuration sold overseas may not be what America gets once the Skyactiv-X becomes an available engine option for us, whenever that is.

I’ll let Jalopnik’s very own David Tracy explain the significance of the Skyactiv-X engine:

At dinner during the 2019 Mazda 3 first drive, Masahiro Moro, president and CEO of Mazda North America, told journalists that the company may still be exploring the full potential of the new engine technology, so we may see different performance specs when the engine finally makes it our way.

There aren't many options but lots of standard equipment.

The 2019 Mazda Mazda3 introduces a radically new look for the brand's compact model, and now you can build the sedan on the automaker's configurator – as of this writing the hatchback isn't available to specify yet. The range-topping Premium model costs $30,940 after adding all of the available accessories.

The base 2019 Mazda Mazda3 Sedan with front-wheel drive starts at $21,920 (after the mandatory $920 destination fee). At this time, the company only offers the naturally aspirated 2.5-liter four-cylinder with 186 horsepower (139 kilowatts) and 186 pound-feet (252 Newton-meters) of torque. A six-speed automatic is the only transmission choice currently. Getting all-wheel drive requires moving up to the Select trim level and requires spending at least $24,920 for the version with torque going to both axles.The top Premium trim goes for $27,420 or $28,820 for a version with all-wheel drive. The model comes well equipped with standard features like with LED headlights, a moonroof, leather upholstery, head-up display, power seats, and 12-speaker stereo. The suite of driver assistance tech includes blind spot monitoring, automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, lane departure warning, lane keep assist, and adaptive cruise control.

There are five exterior colors available. Deep Crystal Blue Mica and Jet Black Mica are no-cost choices. Snowflake White Pearl Mica is $200; Machine Gray Metallic is $300, and Soul Red Crystal Metallic goes for $595. On the inside, there's Black or White leather, and neither of them affects the vehicle's price.

There are also a variety of individual accessories. Buyers can upgrade the interior with items like a wireless charging pad ($275), illuminated door sills ($425), all-weather floor mats ($150), trunk cargo net ($50), carpeted mat in the trunk ($90), rear bumper guard ($100), and auto-dimming rearview mirror with Homelink ($375).

At some point, Mazda will expand the range by adding its Skyactiv-X supercharged 2.0-liter engine that can run on compression ignition. North American specs aren't yet available for the mill, but a European brochure shows the mill producing 178 hp (133 kW). A six-speed manual is on the way, too.

Usually, a supercharger packs extra air into combustion chambers so the engine can mix it with extra fuel, for the sake of more power. In the SKYACTIV-X, it's there not to add power but to keep ramming in enough air at high RPM to maintain an ultra-lean fuel-air ratio.

Towards the end of last year, we heard Mazda’s boss Akira Marumoto ruling out the possibility of a performance version for the gorgeous new Mazda3. Fast forward to April 2019, something must’ve changed in the meantime as an important official from the Zoom-Zoom company has strongly hinted it might just happen. In an interview with Autocar, Mazda3 program manager, Kota Beppu, expressed his interest towards building a go-faster car he referred to as a “hyper” version.

While the hot hatch hasn’t been signed off just yet, company insiders have told Autocar that it’s merely a formality. Beppu told the magazine such a model would primarily target “most developed countries,” such as the United States, Australia, and Japan. He went on to describe himself as a “car guy,” adding he’d want to “drive a high-performance Mazda3… I’ll do my best.”

Mazda has already analyzed several engines to determine which one would be the best fit for the hot hatch, and it looks like the turbocharged 2.5-liter unit came out as the winner. The four-cylinder mill develops 250 horsepower and 310 pound-feet (420 pound-feet) of torque in the CX-9, but it’s not known whether these power figures would carry over on the so-called “hyper” Mazda3. Beppu did say the ample torque might pose a problem in a front-wheel-drive variant as torque steer could hamper the car’s capabilities, hence why going all-wheel drive would be the “obvious solution.”

Rather than engineering the Mazda3 MPS / Mazdaspeed (or whatever it will be called) for track use, the Japanese marque wants to create a performance car that drivers will be able to use on a daily basis everywhere. Beppu said it “needs to be responsible and friendly,” adding it has to be friendlier than the Volkswagen Golf GTI while at the same time being fast.

The report goes on to specify Mazda’s R&D center in Los Angeles has allegedly already made a concept that’s currently under evaluation at the company’s HQ in Hiroshima, Japan. If green-lighted for production, the hotter Mazda3 probably won’t be sold in Europe because that engine would not meet the stringent emissions regulations.