Gadgetory

it's been a number of years now since Hyundai and Kia took over the role as alternatives to the hoary old trio of Camry accord and fusion now they've got more than kim jong on to keep them awake at night because the mazda6 is back and gunning for them let's find out how well it's doing as we check out this 2014 Mazda 6 hi Grand Touring and check the tech now right off the bat you can see Mazda tore everything up and started over again look at this car I mean it used to be in a perennial race with Camry to be the car you least wanted to be seen in now it's entirely the opposite they D goof aside the face and got rid of that dopey Pixar grin that all the other Mazdas are still stuck with this is a handsome car I see this metamorphosis a lot like what happened with the recent Ford Fusion redo except this car stays hot all the way around the rear where the fusion kind of gets a little lumpy around the pipe as with the exterior Mazda blessedly threw out everything on the interior their cars used to look like they had a majority stake and recycled plastics factory now you've got great materials at least on this Grand Touring one first off the navigation right here under a very simple nav button you get two TomTom powered nap one of things I like about it is simplicity if you get stuck or lost you're not a techie all you got to do is stab at the screen and up comes the home menu to do simple things that's part of the TomTom DNA right there from there if you're a TomTom user this is gonna look really familiar to you and there are tens of millions of them out there maybe hundreds of millions I don't know but it's a damn popular platform so this will not require learning for a lot of folks who buy this car and if you don't want to poke through an interestin ation through the touchscreen then it's generally pretty responsive you can also use this controller this is kind of a take off from the iDrive controller and then it has a lot of shortcut buttons around it that's a page they've taken from BMW along with turn kick and push pandora's built in at this trim level as well it's one of the best I've used also in that it completely works without any fussing once you pair the phone for Bluetooth hands-free Pandora is up and running period now we have SMS text message handling in this head unit as well it's a mixed bag you'll see I'm gonna get a big sort of interruption screen it says a message has arrived doesn't tell me who it's from or anything more about it but I have to decide to download it or not shouldn't it automatically be reflected in the head unit I mean it's connected by the way this typically is where it really falls down I did a bunch of tests with text messages it took eighteen to twenty seconds on average for the text to download it's already on my phones you're telling me it takes that long for that SMS to go from here to here then I get this very long download completed screen that I can't interrupt barely and then I can finally read this thing now once you get it you can reply with canned responses only there is no sort of voice dictation freeform reply which also limits the system it blocks out reading while you're driving that's why you have text-to-speech message seriously that is of M AGP a6 it's only a little ironic that the car can't read its own brand name and has to spell that out now before I tell you about the engine this car let me tell you about Mazdas family of engine technologies because they go by the name SKYACTIV which doesn't tell you anything about them it's one of the worst engine brands I've ever heard of here's what it consists of though first of all very high compression thirteen to one which gets a lot of power out of a given amount of fuel the downside is it always wants to predetonate a spark not basically to manage that they've got several technologies including a four to one exhaust manifold and outlet that they say draws heat away from the engine faster combating predetonation and they've got a proprietary piston design here it's basically a piston with a big old well drilled in the top in the middle of it which they say is a key combustion technology to managing that high ratio of compression and finally there's a regenerative braking technology called e I loop or some nonsense another horrible branding exercise what it does is regenerative Li gather energy from braking which a lot of cars do but instead of putting it into a battery or the service battery it puts it into a giant capacitor that is used to run the onboard systems in the cabin okay that plus they say an advanced transmission they're all advanced these days is SKYACTIV two and a half liters sidesaddle inline for direct injection like a lot of motors have these days beyond that nothing fancy like turbos or anything else going on here it's naturally aspirated 184 horsepower 185 foot-pounds of torque moves this 3,200 pound car to 60 in seven seven seven point eight seconds somewhere in there and you're gonna get 26 38 mpg unless you get the manual transmission only available on the bottom trim car by the way and that drops your 1 mpg city and highway not a big deal notice the engine I noticed the transmission I was sure it was a CVT a continuously variable transmission it's not it's a six-speed automatic and that's no compliments but that's how kind of vague and almost slippery I find this transmission I'm not sure if it's the gearbox or if it's the way that the programming is operating power flow to it but either way it's not a real well engaged feeling it always feels kind of rubber banding so once you get through all that how's the engine it's nothing notable I don't know if it's the transmission getting in the way or not but there's no urgency on this engine it doesn't mean it's not adequate but there's no urgency there's no real kind of you know cutting thrust in there it's very three numb in some aspects none of which is to say this is not a fun car to live with as much that's not a fun car to drive you know the difference I mean one is about driving lean forward the other one is about using the car everyday real good in the latter not so much in the former okay they said it's the mazda6 I Grand Touring and that's probably the right model I'd go with to go CNET style here's how I'd set it up start with that top trim car it's thirty thousand six delivered then there's an option for nine hundred bucks to get adaptive cruise control which we have here and forward collision warning tech kind of the same technology doing different things I'd roll that in as well bottom line this is now the most incredibly competitive sector in auto dumb you've got Hyundai Ford Kia Chevy Toyota Honda these guys all offering outstanding cars that all look good I don't envy