Mazda CX-80 review

Mazda has mostly pitched the CX-80 well at the premium crowd – it has a decently posh interior, with lots of fancy tech in the top spec; particularly the ventilated seats that will really give you a gust on a warm day.

We appreciate the buttons, too, though there’s a lot of wasted space on the centre stack around the gear lever and rotary controller for the screen.

Having applauded the quality, the plastics do get cheap below the waist, with some stark borders around the cabin as plush and pauper meet. If you choose to be glass half full about it, you could say that the CX-80 has been carefully designed with some hard-wearing plastics for day to day family use.

It’s all down to taste, but we’re not so keen on the white leather and maple wood trim that you get in the top-spec car. We think it's OTT, but you might think it elegant. It's certainly a change. But then Volvo too offers similar colour cabins, and yet its buyers nearly always opt for black over those light Scandi hues.

Versions with electric seats have a feature that uses the eye sensor in the dash (mainly fitted to feed the driver drowsiness warning) to power the seat, wheel and mirrors into what it calculates will be a good position for someone your size. You'll probably use it the first day you get the car, tweak it a bit, then leave it.

A head-up display is standard. But strangely adaptive cruise control comes only when you climb to the Plus trims.

What are the seating arrangements like?

There are three different seating combinations you can go for on the CX-80: a middle bench for the full seven pews, or a ‘captain’s chair’ setup with two individual chairs in the middle row that are a bit swankier. This can have a walk-through gap between them, or the third option comes with a centre console.

The latter is a £750 option on the top-spec model, adding heated and ventilated chairs. The captain’s chairs with walkthrough space are a no cost option on all CX-80s except the entry model. Both bench and individual seats fold and slide backwards and forwards (by 120mm) for added practicality.

The middle row gets an independent climate control too.

Mazda says that the rearmost seats are ‘comfortable’ if you’re up to 1.7m tall, which we think is a reasonable assessment. If you have smaller children or only need the extra seats for occasional use, then the CX-80 is perfect.

Is there any boot space if it’s full of people?

The CX-80 is largely competitive: you get a reasonable 258 litres of space with all the seats up. That's good enough for a decent slug of supermarket shopping, and it nearly doubles if you travel just six-up and fold one of the split third row. It's 566 litres with the third row down (687 if you shove the middle row all the way forward) and 1,971 litres with all the seats flat.