Gadgetory

now it would be pretty easy for anyone to argue that things have gotten a bit stale over at Mazda I mean the Miata is almost ten years old the cx-7 and the cx-9 have dashboard experiences that are probably older than that and let's face it nobody really liked that big goofy grin that's on all of their current models so in many ways the cx-5 is an opportunity for Mazda to totally reinvent itself with a new model that has a new design language a whole new dashboard experience and a new skyactiv engine technology that helps it to get a bit more efficiency I'm Antoine Goodwin with cnet.com let's take a look at this 2013 cx-5 Grand Touring and see what it's all about underneath the cx-5 s hood and powering the front wheels is a new skyactiv-g gasoline-powered engine the 2-liter four-cylinder mill now we're usually not fans of plastic engine covers but I mean the blue paint on this one that indicates that this is a SKYACTIV model is almost lickable that's not really the important part though what is important is how the direct injection technology in here helps this engine to get 155 horsepower and 150 pound feet of torque now that's not a lot of power but outright power isn't the SKYACTIV game what we're looking for here is efficiency a combination of lightweight materials used throughout the vehicle low friction components in the engine and a couple of aerodynamic tweaks helped the cx-5 to get a fuel economy rating from the EPA of 26 in the city 32 on the highway now you can add an all-wheel drive system for a bit more sure-footedness at the expense of a couple of mile per gallon in each category or you can step down to the decon tinted cx-5 sport model which uses a six-speed manual transmission to get about three more mouths per gallon on the highway for total of 35 now our cx-5 is a Grand Touring model that means most of the tech in the cabin is actually going to come standard that basically includes this 5.8 inch color touch screen and of course a nine speaker Bose audio system in a full cachet of digital audio sources USB connectivity with iPod playback you also got an auxilary input for analog playback there is Sirius XM satellite radio and of course HD radio and bluetooth for hands-free calling and audio streaming now the Bluetooth audio streaming is a bit wonky it seems like it only really wants to play back when the player or audio source that you're listening to displays metadata check this out we've got our Android phone right here and right now we're on the stock audio player that shows metadata now if I jump over to Spotify and start playing something there it stops I can jump back to the standard audio player picks back up again and then finally Pandora you get nothing like nothing of course your phone may report metadata on all of the apps and I hope that's what works for you the navigation system in Mazdas used to be so bad that we'd often find ourselves telling you just skip the whole thing and get a Garmin or a TomTom seems like even Mazdas taking that advice these days because they've switched over to a TomTom powered navigation system give that automaker a couple extra hundred bucks and they'll get you the Grand Touring tech package which amongst other things get you this SD card reader down here and a little SD card that's filled up with TomTom map data this navigation system benefits from tom toms excellent IQ routing software which basically takes into account their HD traffic service to give you the fastest most efficient route between 82 points that basically means that a trip from home to work at 9:00 a.m. may yield a different route from the same trip planned at 11:00 a.m. or even 5:00 p.m. based on historic and current traffic trends so around town the Mazda cx-5 is a little bit rougher than other vehicles in its class that a little bit of extra roughness kind of gives you the illusion that the car would have some sort of really good road handling chops and I mean that about regular around town you know zipping down an off-ramp you know quickly cutting around a corner type speed it's not bad now the biggest problem that I think a lot of people are going to have on their first outing with the cx-5 is that well under fifty five horsepower doesn't sound like a lot on paper and it's not a lot of horsepower in practice you're going to have a hard time just hanging onto 50 mile an hour without really dropping down into fourth or fifth gear but the six-speed Automatic transmission actually isn't that bad I mean aside from a tendency to jump all the way up six gear thereby leaving you out of the power band when you do actually need it to give you a little bit of extra get up and go it is happy to downshift and it'll drop down into fifth if you give it just a little bit extra gas you know for those situations where you need to go up hill and those shifts are crisp and quick not really smooth and sluggish and you loose like you will in a lot of other transmissions the 2013 cx-5 starts at twenty thousand six hundred ninety five dollars for the basic sport model with its manual transmission that's going to get you the best fuel economy now if you're even thinking about getting half of the check that's available on this car go ahead and skip the Touring trim level and jump straight to Grand Touring which is going to get you all of that for twenty seven thousand forty five dollars then go ahead and add one thousand three hundred and twenty-five dollars for the tech package which gets you the TomTom navigation and HID headlights you