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The Mazda CX-9 is the perfect vehicle to convey us from the end of 2022 into the beginning of 2023. That does not include the obvious one – the exterior color was Snowflake White Pearl, as though it was facing Northern Minnesota winter as the answer to the old joke where you display a blank sheet of white paper and claim it’s a painting of a white cow eating marshmallows in a blizzard.

Better reasons for kicking off the New Year with the Mazda CX-9 is tracing the evolution of the vehicle. The original CX-9 was built as a minivan at the top end of Mazda’s fleet of highly efficient and fun-to-drive compact and subcompact sedans and sporty cars.
Several decades later, the Mazda3 is the only remaining car in Mazda’s fleet, replaced by a collection of compact SUVs like the CX-3, CX-5, CX-30, CX-50 and CX-60.
Interestingly, the clever folks at Mazda have tailored the CX-9 to fit in perfectly, at the roomy end of the fleet. No longer a minivan, the CX-9 subtly gives you a flip-down third-row seat behind the two rows of captain’s-chair buckets.
From the side, you might notice that the rear doors are longer than you expect, which means you get extra room if you want to fold the second-row bucket forward and hop into the third row.
That allows Mazda to claim six occupants can fit into the CX-9, and they do. Those in the front two rows all get extremely comfortable bucket seats for the ride.
The sporty driving of the other Mazda vehicles spills over as an intrinsic element of the CX-9’s qualities, too, which include the newest Mazda 2.5-liter SkyActiv powertrain and the brilliant G-Vectoring-Plus handling suspension that tweaks the independent front and rear suspension and stabilizer bars to sporty-car perfection.

Among the details that Mazda doesn’t even boast about are the same brilliant – in more ways than one – headlights from the smaller SUVs. Naturally they are adaptive, meaning that they swing left and right in tune with your steering intentions.
But they also have a cutoff that means you get absolute brilliance on the road and complete darkness above the horizontal line, preventing your LED beams from blinding oncoming drivers. Even on low beams, the lighting ahead keeps you notified of deer or pedestrians wandering into the roadway ahead, bolstered by the LED foglights that click off when you go to high beams.

The other thing that has engulfed the industry the last couple of years is finding ways to accent their exteriors, usually by wrapping lights to enhance the headlights.
Mazda has a new trick there. After parking next to our garage and walking into the house, I glanced back and was surprised that the chrome strip underlining the familiar Mazda grille seemed to be able to reflect what little light there was. Then I realized it wasn’t a reflection, but a very thin and pleasingly subtle accent light that underlines the bottom half of the grille.

There is no way you can fail to tell this is a Mazda.
When Mazda engineers first installed the SkyActiv engines and house-built transmissions into its small cars and SUVs, the CX-9 wasn’t included, but the new elements were so beneficial they had to be coming.
Same with G-Vectoring and G-Vectoring Plus, which remains a unique concept in cornering, because it detunes, rather than bolsters, the outside front suspension for just a millisecond, convincing you as a driver that you’re making the right move on your turning vector.
The result is that you never have to correct, because you’re guided to steer correctly from the start.
For a time, it was interesting to watch the competition make great advancements in lane-keeping on one hand, and Mazda making you steer better than you might have planned on the other.
However, some of those competitive virtues are also worth applying, so a vehicle like the 2023 CX-9 has Mazda’s handling assets and also has dynamic stability control, traction control, trailer towing stability control, blind-spot alert, lane-departure warning, lane-keeping assist, rear cross-traffic alert and iActiv all-wheel drive with steering-wheel paddle shifters for manual control.

What you are controlling is that Mazda 2.5-liter 4-cylinder SkyActiv engine, which is turbocharged to produce 227 horsepower and 310 foot-pounds of torque. It is more than enough to send the CX-9 on its zoom-zoom way and let you try out all those incredibly coordinated electronic and computerized driving aids.

The beauty is that you don’t feel they are intrusive, because the coordination of every element is silky smooth.
If you were to spend $150,000 for an exotic vehicle, I cannot think of any manufacturer who even makes all the collection of high-technology parts that come on the CX-9.
That means the sticker price of $50,130 is a bargain, no matter how you slice it.
While I thoroughly enjoyed attempting to test and evaluate all those elements during my week with the Snowflake White Pearl CX-9, another perfect part of the test was winter-driving, because up along the North Shore of Lake Superior near Duluth, sure enough we were hammered by an extensive snowstorm through most of the week – contributing to a record 44.7 inches of snow for December in Duluth.

And the CX-9’s all-wheel drive handled it all with smoothness and security.
If I had another week with it, I’d bring along a package of marshmallows.