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If the question is which compact sedan or SUV comes the closest to providing a sporty-car handling experience, there are a lot of answers out there, and more of them every year. But if you want the best answer, unequivocally, you need to locate a Mazda dealership and take a test-drive in any of several vehicles.
My latest choice is a unique compromise called the Mazda CX-30. This is not to be confused with the CX-3, which is the too-small initial base-model of Mazda’s fleet of compact SUVs. If you have little kids, the CX-3 would work just fine, but little kids become bigger kids, and once they become teenagers, you are going to have problems with the too-small rear seat space.
So Mazda grew up with its clientele, creating the CX-30, which is just a tad larger in all meaningful dimensions — headroom, legroom, shoulder space, and eliminating the “Mom…Billy’s sitting too close to me!” It looks good, too, with a more graceful collection of contours and lights blending into the grille, and it goes better as well, with Mazda’s newly introduced 2.5-liter 4-cylinder.
That 2.5 is of the most recent SkyActive levels of technical perfection, and it is coupled with G-vectoring balance control, which sends you zipping around corners and tight curves as if on rails. Mazda also responded to critics who couldn’t see beyond their need for speed and complained that the smaller Mazdas were adequate but no more — by installing a turbocharger that makes the 2.5 feel like it might be twice that displacement.
With good reason, I might add. The new turbo 2.5 delivers 227 horsepower and 310 foot-pounds of torque, which is far above the “adequate” line by any measurement.
Personally, I always enjoyed running Mazda’s engines up to their limits and found them more than adequate, because not only did they challenge, if not beating their rivals in a drag-race, but they delivered incredible fuel economy. We’re talking mid-30s to mid-40s for miles per gallon. So I will accept the obvious boost in power and acceleration — enough to win those drag-races with your neighbor — and I will accept that gas mileage might dip by up to 10 mpg. Still, we got up to 32 miles per gallon, which was above the EPA estimated highway calculation of 30 mpg.
Mazda made he corporate decision to send its cars upscale a couple years ago, so it added the CX-50 and CX-90 to its SUV corral, and the CX-30 is next in line. I would say it’s a definite success, because it remains slightly more compact than the CX-5 but satisfies the criticism that the CX-3 is too confining.
The major auto magazines — or what remains of the likes of Car & Driver and Motor Trend — have regularly raved about all things Mazda, and whichever one they pick usually wins the comparative analysis being conducted. But I have yet to see regular explanations of what makes Mazdas the best-handling vehicles on the planet.
The G-vectoring confounded my instincts, because having driven a few race cars, it seems obvious to me that if you make a quick and severe left turn, for example, you should want to have the outside wheel’s suspension bolstered or stiffened to support the accompanying weight shift. Well, Mazda engineers spent a decade testing and experimenting with all sorts of vehicles on all sorts of roads, and came up with the revolutionary idea that the opposite would work best — slightly decreasing the stiffness of the outside wheel by cutting it back for a millisecond actually makes the driver feel as though his hunch of turning into that corner is precisely correct.
That confidence and technical explanation combines to make an almost magical effect of you turning sharply and never having to correct the steering wheel. It also makes you a safer driver, and, aided by the extremely smooth and precise-shifting 6-speed automatic and the iActive all-wheel-drive, you head on your way knowing the CX-30 also has all the most contemporary safety features — lane departure alert, rear cross-traffic warning, blind spot detection, lane keeping assist, pedestrian detection, dynamic stability control, and traction control.
So take one for a test drive, but clear your mind of the intricacies of the unique Mazda G-vectoring system, and you will return with the feeling that you don’t care how it came about, but all you know is that this CX-30 is the best-handling compact SUV you’ve ever driven.
You also will appreciate the upgrade in classiness to the interior, with its glossy black trim accents on the console and elsewhere, and the firm comfort of the bucket seats, while the legibility of the instruments and the large information screen placed up high, in the driver’s line of vision, right in the upper middle of the dashboard.
All of those features gathered up in the CX-30 make you appreciate that it costs a fair amount o money to develop such technology for the real world, so raising the prices makes some sense. The test CX-30 I drove had a base price of $36,800 and an as-tested sticker of $38,760, which includes the only options. the Polymetal Gray metallic paint and the 360-degree surround camera readout on that big screen.
Mazda had a great advertising campaign a few years back, suggesting that all Mazda vehicles contained a dose of “Zoom-zoom,” which was the superb sportiness inherent in the Miata 2-seater sports car. That campaign seems to have faded away, which is unfortunate, because the new CX-30 has all the ingredients that could make a sensational sports car or sporty car.
This one just happens to be disguised as a compact SUV.
My latest choice is a unique compromise called the Mazda CX-30. This is not to be confused with the CX-3, which is the too-small initial base-model of Mazda’s fleet of compact SUVs. If you have little kids, the CX-3 would work just fine, but little kids become bigger kids, and once they become teenagers, you are going to have problems with the too-small rear seat space.
So Mazda grew up with its clientele, creating the CX-30, which is just a tad larger in all meaningful dimensions — headroom, legroom, shoulder space, and eliminating the “Mom…Billy’s sitting too close to me!” It looks good, too, with a more graceful collection of contours and lights blending into the grille, and it goes better as well, with Mazda’s newly introduced 2.5-liter 4-cylinder.
That 2.5 is of the most recent SkyActive levels of technical perfection, and it is coupled with G-vectoring balance control, which sends you zipping around corners and tight curves as if on rails. Mazda also responded to critics who couldn’t see beyond their need for speed and complained that the smaller Mazdas were adequate but no more — by installing a turbocharger that makes the 2.5 feel like it might be twice that displacement.
With good reason, I might add. The new turbo 2.5 delivers 227 horsepower and 310 foot-pounds of torque, which is far above the “adequate” line by any measurement.
Personally, I always enjoyed running Mazda’s engines up to their limits and found them more than adequate, because not only did they challenge, if not beating their rivals in a drag-race, but they delivered incredible fuel economy. We’re talking mid-30s to mid-40s for miles per gallon. So I will accept the obvious boost in power and acceleration — enough to win those drag-races with your neighbor — and I will accept that gas mileage might dip by up to 10 mpg. Still, we got up to 32 miles per gallon, which was above the EPA estimated highway calculation of 30 mpg.
Mazda made he corporate decision to send its cars upscale a couple years ago, so it added the CX-50 and CX-90 to its SUV corral, and the CX-30 is next in line. I would say it’s a definite success, because it remains slightly more compact than the CX-5 but satisfies the criticism that the CX-3 is too confining.
The major auto magazines — or what remains of the likes of Car & Driver and Motor Trend — have regularly raved about all things Mazda, and whichever one they pick usually wins the comparative analysis being conducted. But I have yet to see regular explanations of what makes Mazdas the best-handling vehicles on the planet.
The G-vectoring confounded my instincts, because having driven a few race cars, it seems obvious to me that if you make a quick and severe left turn, for example, you should want to have the outside wheel’s suspension bolstered or stiffened to support the accompanying weight shift. Well, Mazda engineers spent a decade testing and experimenting with all sorts of vehicles on all sorts of roads, and came up with the revolutionary idea that the opposite would work best — slightly decreasing the stiffness of the outside wheel by cutting it back for a millisecond actually makes the driver feel as though his hunch of turning into that corner is precisely correct.
That confidence and technical explanation combines to make an almost magical effect of you turning sharply and never having to correct the steering wheel. It also makes you a safer driver, and, aided by the extremely smooth and precise-shifting 6-speed automatic and the iActive all-wheel-drive, you head on your way knowing the CX-30 also has all the most contemporary safety features — lane departure alert, rear cross-traffic warning, blind spot detection, lane keeping assist, pedestrian detection, dynamic stability control, and traction control.
So take one for a test drive, but clear your mind of the intricacies of the unique Mazda G-vectoring system, and you will return with the feeling that you don’t care how it came about, but all you know is that this CX-30 is the best-handling compact SUV you’ve ever driven.
You also will appreciate the upgrade in classiness to the interior, with its glossy black trim accents on the console and elsewhere, and the firm comfort of the bucket seats, while the legibility of the instruments and the large information screen placed up high, in the driver’s line of vision, right in the upper middle of the dashboard.
All of those features gathered up in the CX-30 make you appreciate that it costs a fair amount o money to develop such technology for the real world, so raising the prices makes some sense. The test CX-30 I drove had a base price of $36,800 and an as-tested sticker of $38,760, which includes the only options. the Polymetal Gray metallic paint and the 360-degree surround camera readout on that big screen.
Mazda had a great advertising campaign a few years back, suggesting that all Mazda vehicles contained a dose of “Zoom-zoom,” which was the superb sportiness inherent in the Miata 2-seater sports car. That campaign seems to have faded away, which is unfortunate, because the new CX-30 has all the ingredients that could make a sensational sports car or sporty car.
This one just happens to be disguised as a compact SUV.
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