The IT Nerd

The Mazda CX-9 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 a knob that you turn to start the vehicle. 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, twist the knob and drive away. When you’ve reached your destination, twist the knob 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, open and close the rear hatch, 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 with Cross Traffic Alerts: 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. Cross traffic alerts were very handy when I went grocery shopping as it kept an eye out for traffic as I backed out of my parking space.
• Backup sensors to keep you from hitting anything while reversing.
• You get anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control, roll 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-59has 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-9 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.

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 a 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.

The Mazda CX-9 has a lot of technology packed into it and it has great audio and a good infotainment system too boot. 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 October 23, 2014 at 7:00 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.