The IT Nerd

The Mazda CX-5 is filled with all sorts of technology that I have to cover.

Let’s start with actually driving the car. The GT trim level gives you a proximity key with push button start. Thus all you have to do is press a button on the driver’s door handle. Press it and the car will unlock. Get in, hit the start/stop button and drive away. When you’ve reached your destination, press the start/stop button to turn off the car. Then get out of the car and press the button to lock the car. You never need to pull out the key fob to do any of this. But the key fob does have the ability to lock and unlock the doors, plus it has the ever useful panic button. As an added bonus, it has a backup key inside the key fob should you need it.

Now onto the safety features. This Mazda CX-5 comes with a lot of safety features:

• Blind Spot Monitoring: This system keeps an eye out for cars in your blind spots so that you don’t hit them when changing lanes. It works well as the area of detection was large enough to keep me safe, but not so large that it created false positives.
• Smart City Brake Support: Let’s say that you you do not react in time to a car that panic stops in front of you. This Mazda is capable of coming to a stop at low speeds, or slowing down to make the impact less severe. You can get more details on this system here.
• Adaptive Front Lighting System: I wrote about this previously and I have to admit that on some of the back roads that I drive at night, this feature comes in handy. I was always able to see what was in front of me clearly. I should also note that this trim level comes with Bi-Xenon HID headlights as well The lighting can be set to automatic so that you never have to worry about turning the lights on and off. I found that the levels where the lights might turn on to be better than most cars that I’ve driven as on a dark overcast day, the lights would come on in this Mazda. That’s something that would not happen in a lot of cars in similar systems.
• You get anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control, and electronic brake force distribution
• Finally, you get dual front air bags, dual front side air bags and dual side air curtains

Now let’s move on to the infotainment system. The Mazda CX-5 has a 5.8″ touchscreen that allows you to control the radio (AM/FM and Sirrus), Bluetooth, USB, and Pandora. The latter requires you to have the Pandora app on your smartphone to make this feature work. Though at the moment, Pandora is only available in U.S., Australia and New Zealand. If that changes, the Mazda CX-5 is ready to go. Now this was similar to the Mazda6 that I drove recently with one exception. There was no HMI (Human-Machine Interface) Commander Switch behind the shift lever to make it easy to interact with the touchscreen. Thus you have to use the touchscreen to do everything. I could have used HMI Commander Switch as the touchscreen is sometimes “interesting” to use when someone like me has big fingers as I ended up sometimes pressing more than one thing at the same time. It also attracted fingerprints the more I used it. What makes up for that is a very good voice command system. Tip: there are several tutorials that will help you not only use the system, but pair your phone via Bluetooth. Spend some time listening to them to get the most out of the system. A comment from my wife was that the ringtone generated from the system every time a phone call came in (which I did not find a way to change) was high pitched and jarring. It didn’t bother me though. Thus your mileage may vary on that front.

I plugged my iPhone 5s into the USB port and all my tunes and playlists were accessible. Though I did have to wait about 5 minutes for the contents of my iPhone 5s to be accessible. But in any case, everything worked perfectly. No matter what song I tossed at it, be it MP3 or AAC, it worked. One oddity that I found was that on a few occasions when I plugged my iPhone 5s into the USB port and it finished scanning, it would sometimes not display my playlists. Unplugging and plugging back in would solve the problem (though I will have to wait 5 minutes for the contents of my iPhone 5s to be read again which was annoying). I was able to reproduce this with my wife’s iPhone 5 so this is clearly a bug that Mazda needs to address. Since we’re talking about music, this Mazda has an 9 speaker Bose sound system. I have to admit that regardless where I was in the Mazda, the sound was excellent as the highs and lows were perfect and the audio was well balanced. Phone calls were clear on both ends of the conversation as well. For those of you who still use CDs, there’s a CD drive as well which is located just above the touchscreen.

When it comes to navigation, the system is powered by Tom Tom. Some things I really liked about this system:

• It always asked me if I wanted to use toll roads and high occupancy lanes when coming up with routes. That’s a very nice feature as you don’t have to fish into the options to turn off or on the ability to avoid toll roads. It also offered to avoid roads that were closed.
• Traffic was always accounted for and it would re-route me if it could find a faster route.
• The audio directions are clear and the screen offers guidance as to what lane you should be in.
• Maps can be updated via a SD Card

Now the touchscreen also doubles as the screen for the backup camera. It was easy to manoeuvre into a space as its field of vision was very good. Though I will note that the actual camera is exposed to the elements. Thus I have to wonder what the video quality would be like if the Mazda gets really dirty. Another observation, unlike most cars these days there’s no option for cross traffic alerts (handy in mall environments) or backup sensors to warn you of objects that you might hit while reversing in the CX-5.

The Mazda CX-5 has a lot of technology packed into it. It can stop itself if you don’t react in time, it has great audio and a good infotainment system. It’s going to appeal to many who look at it.

The final part of this review will tie up some loose ends and I’ll give you my final verdict. Watch for it on Friday.

This entry was posted on June 19, 2014 at 7:21 am and is filed under Products with tags Mazda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.