From the November 2016 issue
Crossover SUVs are appliances, the toasters of autodom, purchased and driven by pragmatic people making pragmatic choices. They?re as ubiquitous as they are routine, crawling through Piggly Wiggly parking lots and plugging along in middle-school pickup lines. Like refugees of a child-free lifestyle, most have fully surrendered themselves to domestic duty. Crossovers meet the need. They check the box. But they don?t light any fires. Loving one doesn?t come naturally to me.
Yet, I do. I own a 2016 Mazda CX-5, and I love it.
I love it because I don?t feel the weight of domestic burden every time I turn the steering wheel. I don?t have to. Because it turns like a car. Better than many cars, in fact. When the CX-5 was introduced, Mazda engineers wheeled the crossover around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca faster than the smaller, lighter Mazda 3 with the same powertrain. Unlike many of its counterparts, it?s not just an A-to-B appliance with good visibility and cargo space. Rather, it?s a carefully crafted driving machine that happens to offer those virtues. Even the details are right.
Like all Mazda SUVs, its stability control can?t be disabled. An attempt to thwart mid-winter parking-lot donuts, perhaps" To diminish fun on gravel roads" To keep a relatively tall vehicle safe from the haunting left hook of physics" Actually, it?s only that last one, because Mazda nailed the stability-control calibration on the CX-5 so perfectly that it wi...