CX-9 finishes product blitz
The roll-out of Mazda’s Skyactiv technology has come full circle with an all-new CX-9. But the innovation won’t stop there, reports Paul Owen.
Mazda hasn’t yet built us a flux-capacitor to enable time travel, but if any company can it’s probably the comparatively lowvolume carmaker from Hiroshima.
I came to this conclusion while chatting to a North American engineer, Dave Coleman, about his work on an all-new CX-9 sevenseat SUV. How many new patents did Mazda apply for during the development of the CX-9? Evidently too many for Coleman to accurately count them all when cold-collared by a Kiwi motornoter at the side of a Canterbury racetrack. Rest assured that it’s quite a few given the amount of innovation that went into Mazda’s newest and most high-end model.
Foremost of the new tech is a new 2.5-litre turbocharged fourcylinder petrol engine that uses boost pressure to improve performance primarily in the parts of the rev range that we use every day. Mazda has gone to an awful lot of trouble to ensure that the newest petrol motor, and the first of the direct-injection Skyactiv engine family to utilise a turbo, delivers the precisely the same torque delivery characteristics as a diesel.
Why make such an effort? Eighty per cent of the 50,000 CX-9s Mazda will build each year will find North American homes, and the US market is quite diesel-phobic given the extra cost per gallon of the more energy-dense fuel at the pumps over there. Hence the newly-patented technologies that improve exhaust gas flow and combustion chamber scavenging early in the rev range of the new 2.5 turbo. These enable it to produce 420Nm of driving force at just 2000rpm – exactly the same figures as those generated by the 2.2-litre diesel used by the CX-5 SUV.
At the opposite end of the rev range, the new 2.5 appears to have retained the main advantage of petrol engines – their powerenhancing ability to rev harder than a diesel and be less vocal while doing so. The 170kW the 2.5 produces on 91 octane fuel at 5000rpm easily eclipses the 129kW developed by the 2.2 diesel just 500rpm earlier, and that’s before upping the ante by putting 98 octane in the tank of the CX-9. This allows the new motor to develop an even healthier power peak of 186kW.
Diesel’s one remaining trump card in comparison with this newage turbo-petrol would appear to be fuel economy thanks to the bigger bangs the fuel produces with each firing stroke. Mazda quotes 8.4 and 8.8 litres/100km for the combined lab test results of the front-drive and all-wheel-drive versions of the CX-9 respectively. These are noteworthy results for a petrol engine hooked up to a sixspeed automatic gearbox and driving a spacious seven-seat vehicle that is more than five metres long and weighs between 1849 and 1924kg according to powertrain and model tier.
A diesel possibly would have trimmed those figures by around 1.5 litres/100km according to my amateur calculations based on the kerb mass of the new CX-9 and its relatively efficient aerodynamics (coefficient of drag: 0.34).
The CX-9 generates similar 0-100kmh sprint figures to those of the previous 204kW/367Nm 3.6 litre V6-powered model courtesy of its lighter weight, with the frontdrive GSX cutting out the sprint in 8.6 seconds and the AWD Limited taking 8.8. But the real difference is felt in the more effortless way the new turbo goes about its business.
It gets off the line with more enthusiasm, and keeping it reined in to legal speeds on the open road is harder given all that accessible force tends to push it along harder. Much attention to cabin acoustics has also dulled driver’s perceptions of vehicle speed in the CX-9. Best then to let the intelligent cruise control take care of licence preservation when travelling outside city limits. It’s clever enough to maintain following distances and bring the CX-9 to a complete stop if required.
The latter is one component of a complete safety equipment inventory fitted to the three-model New Zealand CX-9 range. Even the $52,995 front-drive GSX entry model gets autonomous city braking (be warned that the camera may not pick out pedestrians when hit by sun strike), blind-spot monitoring, rear cross-traffic alert, reversing cam, and the more accurate vehicle speed info provided by satellite navigation.
Add $2500 for the AWD version of the GSX. The $62,995 Limited is only available in AWD form and gets lane-departure monitoring, driver alertness monitoring, and front parking sensors added to the incident-prevention measures.
It also enjoys the most luxuriously-furnished Mazda cabin since the 929 luxury saloon of the 1990s.
So who’s going to buy the other 20 per cent of CX-9s Mazda will make? Us, the Aussies, and the South East Asians. It’s a unique Japanese company in that the sales of Mazdas in Tasman Sea markets outnumber those sold in the entire European Community.
So a little more consultation of driver preferences down under would have been nice. The steering and handling characteristics of the CX-9 generally reflect the targeting by Coleman’s development team of ASMs – American Soccer Moms.
So it’s going to be interesting to see whether this highly-drivable new 2.5 turbo will be made available in future updates of the Mazda6 and Mazda3 cars more suited to Antipodean tastes.
These will also come with a new steering technology called G-Vectoring that improves the turn-in phase of cornering by replicating the left-foot-braking technique of a rally driver.
Seems Mazda’s thirst for innovation will not be sated now that new CX-9 has made the current roll-out of Skyactiv technology complete.