Mazda MX-30 review

It’s all rather pleasant in here, with lots of vegan-friendly materials and cool cork trim on the cup holders, centre console and inside edges of the door handles. Though we’re not sure why Mazda felt the need to hide it all away.

All the major controls have been kept safe and approachable too. The MX-30’s engineers have seen everyone else mess with the gear selector formula, and chosen to fit something that physically clicks through drive modes. Everyone else, take note.

Another reassuring touch is its traditional, analogue fuel level and battery gauges to show how much juice is left. No hard-to-fathom digital nonsense here.

Are there any modern touches?

Every MX-30 gets a head-up display, 7in colour instrument panel, and two central displays: one's an 8.8in widescreen up top for media, nav or your smartphone interface (operated via the clickwheel), the other's a 7in touchscreen down below for the climate control.

The latter is also lined with physical buttons, though we’d argue the fact it only displays climate is a missed opportunity given how much room it takes up. It might as well not have been a touchscreen at all, given how little we used it.

Is it roomy?

In the rear things will be a bit of a squeeze for adults, but it's manageable over short distances. It’ll be worth having a poke around one of these before committing your kids to school runs in the back seats.

Cool as those rear-hinged back doors are, they lead to pretty poor visibility for both driver and passengers. And you’ll find yourself having to repeatedly explain how to open them. Grr.

Boot capacity in the base-spec model is 350 litres seats up, and 1,155 litres seats down. Or slightly less for models equipped with the Bose sound system. That beats its small city car rivals and puts it roughly on par with a Jeep Avenger, but leaves it trailing some way behind most of its small SUV competitors.

It feels shallow too, but at least the double floor gives you somewhere to stash dirty charging cables.