Mazda CX-30: Startlingly good and hot on the exhaust of its premium rivals

The Mazda CX-30 has style, a seriously premium interior, and a 2lt petrol engine with mild hybrid technology

The Mazda CX-30 leaves its non-premium rivals for dead here and shames many of the premium one too – especially those that demand a kings’ ransom for many of the goodies mentioned above.

Mazda CX-30
Rating	★★★★☆
Price	from €29,495 – 100th Anniversary Special €39,165
Engine	a largely silky 2.0 petrol with mild hybrid technology and 186bhp
The Spec	startlingly good and embarrassingly so for its nonpremium and premium rivals alike
Verdict	an excellent car, but seemingly an acquired taste

There are times in this gig when you come across a truly excellent car and are left baffled by the fact there is nobody – or at best a simple exalted few – that appears to know anything of it or appreciate what it can offer them. With one or two minor quibbles, the Mazda CX-30 is such a car.

The CX-30 resolutely flies under the radar. It is Ireland’s 77th best-selling car and so far this year it has sold just 327 models – even though that figure is slightly ahead of its 2020 performance, up twelve units in the January-August figures.

As a sub-compact crossover the CX-30 is up against quite the plethora of opponents, with such as Ford, Fiat, Range Rover, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Kia, Audi, Hyundai, BMW, Renault, Mercedes, VW, SEAT, Skoda, Citroen, Peugeot and pretty much everyone else of note within the automotive business fielding contenders, you can see why it is hard for the little Mazda to force its head above the parapet.

But, blessed as it is with style, a seriously premium interior and a two-litre petrol engine with mild-hybrid technology, it should have no difficulty in separating itself from the pack. But it actually appears to have grave difficulty in doing so.

Perhaps it is that Mazda could be accused of missing a trick here because of its laudable if flawed insistence on persevering with ‘normal’ internal combustion engines – both petrol and diesel – and avoiding the current zeitgeist for hybrids and PHEVS. Sure the tester this week is a mild hybrid, but you’d be hard pressed to notice.

This two-litre is from the Mazda family of SkyActiv engines – in this case the SkyActiv X – which utilises a fiendishly clever compression ignition system which is supposed to deliver petrol engine performance alongside diesel engine consumption levels. It does deliver on this promise, but it’s not something that might be fully appreciated by the masses.

For a unit with an output of 186 bhp, it does feel a little breathless, until you get the rev counter swinging past the 6,000 that is. Sure you get most of the 240 Nm of torque at 4,000 revs, but you don’t get maximum power for a further two thousand revs.

The car boasts such as radar cruise control, a 360-degree view parking monitor, automatic emergency braking (which is not anywhere near as intrusive as those in many rivals), adaptive headlights with high beam assist, tilt and slide sunroof, 12-speaker BOSE sound system, 18” alloys, electric drivers’ seat, and an excellently intuitive infotainment system with an 8.8” screen.

Now, while that might suit a lot of benzinas like myself, it is not something your average SUV-er will really ever get into the swing of. Most such drivers like to pootle around and rarely like to stretch their engines anyway.

With this Mazda you simply have to stretch it if you want to extract the max from it – there’s no other way of doing it. This characteristic will thus be off-putting for the pootling classes. But, even for the benzinas among us, the 8.3 second 0-100 km/h time will barely raise an eyebrow, while the 204 km/h top speed doesn’t really indicate anything special either.

That it will return 5.7 l/100km (49.1 mpg) is good, but there are a lot of smaller capacity petrol engines around right now that will easily return those sort of figures, so the Mazda sort of falls between two stools and that might put some buyers off.

All of that is not to say this is a bad engine or anything – it’s not. It is a little gruff on start-up, but once in motion is very smooth and the general feeling of well-being in that department is accentuated by the slick six speed manual ‘box which is a wonderful example of how to do things right. In fact this is a gearbox we’d take ahead of most automatics, which says a lot about it.

On the road, the CX-30 has many other positives. It rides really well and the handling is as sharp as any front driver; the steering too is nicely weighted and very precise and these are characteristics which are not always found in the SUV genre.

It must be pointed out that the tester we were given is the 100th Anniversary special edition of the car and that adds a lot of added kit to the overall specification, not least the unique badging, the ‘snowflake white’ pearlescent metallic paint and the burgundy leather seat trim with the embossed 100-year logo.

To describe the décor as ‘opulent’ might seem strange for anything outside accepted premium segment norms, but that’s exactly what it is. The whole interior seems to have been sprung from an upmarket German car.

It rides really well and the handling is as sharp as any front driver; the steering too is nicely weighted and very precise and these are characteristics which are not always found in the SUV genre.

Indeed comparisons with such as the Audi Q2 are not exaggerating matters and it would be fair to say that the layout is better than in sub compact SUVs from Mercedes and BMW. It might thus be obvious that this CX-30 therefore leaves its’ non-premium competitors for dead in this department.

And that’s also the case when it comes to kit levels, where the car boasts such as radar cruise control, a 360-degree view parking monitor, automatic emergency braking (which is not anywhere near as intrusive as those in many rivals), adaptive headlights with high beam assist, tilt and slide sunroof, 12-speaker BOSE sound system, 18” alloys, electric drivers’ seat, and an excellently intuitive infotainment system with an 8.8” screen.

Again, the car leaves its non-premium rivals for dead here and shames many of the premium one too – especially those that demand a kings’ ransom for many of the goodies mentioned above.

As a small SUV, the car’s practicality is necessarily limited by size, so don’t expect this to be your practical day-to-day warrior in family terms. The rear quarters are on the tight side and the boot isn’t huge either (although there is some underfloor storage), but that’s common across the sub compact segment.

It is a good thing that Mazda resolutely follows its own – sometimes idiosyncratic – path. It is good that it makes engines not necessarily to blindly follow the lead of others and follow its own engineering path instead. And, it is also good that the company’s design department continues to churn out sharp, good-looking cars.

However, part of the Mazda conundrum is that the company’s resolution in these departments is not always rewarded by fantastic sales figures. People already inured in what might be termed the ‘Mazda way’ will love that so many aspects of the engineering and design seem to be tailored directly for them.

That said, the other side of the coin is that Mazda agnostics will remain blind to the unique specialness of the cars the company makes and we here at Examiner Motoring think that is a sad thing.

Sad too is that the Mazda does make a reasonably compelling case for itself, but that all too few appear to be taking notice.