As a younger man I used to be baffled when there was a crime and a police statement said that an eyewitness had described the getaway vehicle as a “white saloon”. I’d sit there thinking, surely, even if you aren’t interested in cars at all, you could come up with a better description than that.
If I’d been the witness, I’d have been a bit more specific. I’d have said it was a glacier-white Vauxhall Cavalier, which, because it had small red stripes on the side trim and a deeper front spoiler, was likely to have been a post 1987 SRi 130. I knew this kind of stuff. It was embedded in me.
When I was ten my dad brought his Cortina 1600E back from the menders after one of his many shunts and I noticed they’d fitted a grille from a Cortina 1600 Super. And I had a paddy fit when he said, “It doesn’t matter.” Because it did matter.
Not any more, though, because cars today have become like trees. Or milk bottles. Homogeneity is now so rife that even a walking automotive encyclopedia like me would be forced, if asked by the police to describe a getaway car, to say, “Er… it was a white saloon.”
Last week I opened my front door to find that someone had dropped off a car for me to review. And as I couldn’t see a badge, I had no idea what it was. It was finished in the same sort of brownish burgundy you find on the bedspreads in budget American motels, and it had some chrome trim that I guessed had been fitted to make it look upmarket and swish.
It turned out to be a Mazda CX-80 AWD Takumi Plus. And what you get in exchange for nearly £60,000 is a seven-seater that would make an ideal getaway car, because there’s no one in the world who’d be able to tell the police what it was. Not even the man who designed it, I should imagine, because plainly he rattled it off in a coffee break and had forgotten all about it by lunchtime. To behold, then, it is very boring.
To drive it is not boring. It is terrible. It may say “Skyactiv” on the boot lid, which gives the impression the car operates like it’s been hung from a cloud. And it does, but not a fluffy summer meadow cloud. More a sort of burgeoning Louisiana cumulonimbus.
Skyactiv actually refers to the engine, so is that better? No. It’s worse. You can have a petrol hybrid, but my test car was fitted with a 3.3-litre six-cylinder diesel featuring distribution controlled partially premixed compression ignition and a 48V M hybrid boost. I have no idea what any of this means, but I can report that the end result, while economical and clean, is canal-boat rough.
Happily you’ll never be going fast enough in the real world to find this out because it is fitted with a speed limit warning system. It can be turned off, but only if you are a tech bro and you have a fortnight to spare before you set off. Of course, you could argue that there’s a simpler way of preventing the beeps and bongs. Drive below the speed limit. Hmm. This is a philosophical point, because some speed limits make sense and others don’t, and round where I live are new 20mph zones that make no sense at all.
The problem is that in the Cotswolds there are no marauding gangs of youths, the hedgerows are not full of discarded needles and there are no fentanyl enthusiasts cluttering up the bus shelters. Which means that when the parish councils meet, after they’ve lodged their objection to every single request for planning permission, they have nothing left to talk about. So to fill the time they discuss the need to carpet-bomb villages with silly speed limits. About one driver in ten sticks to these, causing the other nine to become infuriated and overtake stupidly. Which is far more dangerous than allowing everyone to pootle along at a more sensible 30 or 40.
I loathe driving at 20, unless I’m on my way through the gears to a more sensible cruising speed. It’s antisocial, dangerous and Liberal Democratish. But in a car that bongs hysterically if you don’t comply, there’s little choice. And what made things even worse in the bedspread burgundy Mazda is that it thought my own farm drive had a 20mph limit and forced me to drive down that at a snail’s pace too.
At this point you’re probably expecting me to turn everything round and say that, despite these problems, the CX-80 is worth a look because the interior is a cathedral to good taste and the four cornerstones of luxury. But it isn’t. It’s crap. They’ve obviously looked at the way Volvo has used pale wood to give off an architect vibe in its seven-seater and thought they could achieve the same with some Japanese maple. Instead, however, they’ve ended up with the sort of shiny finish that only exists in seaside junk shops.
Sure, you can specify your seats to come in a vast array of different configurations, but the car isn’t really big enough to make any of them work. The fact is that you can either put kids in the back or stuff in the boot. Not both.
I honestly couldn’t find a single redeeming feature in this car. It’s boring to behold, tacky on the inside, rough to drive and annoying. Lisa quite liked it, weirdly. She said that if she wore her earphones she couldn’t hear the speed bongs. Then I told her it’s sixty grand and she didn’t like it either.
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I actually feel sorry for the team that designed it. Presumably they joined Mazda because they wanted to work on cars like the MX-5 or the RX-7. They wanted to make exciting cars that snarled, whizzed, crackled and popped. Asking them to design the CX-80 is like asking Dostoevsky to write a pamphlet. Or Led Zep to write lift music. They’re not going to put their heart and soul into it.
And what makes it all so depressing is that Mazda isn’t alone. All car firms today are forced to think sensibly and greenly and inside the box. That’s why I can no longer identify any of the cars they make. I bet they couldn’t either.
And you? Well, if you need a seven-seater, get a three-year-old Volvo XC90. It won’t bong at you all the time, it has a dash that doesn’t look like it came from an own-brand Seventies music centre and it’ll cost about £20,000 less than the Mazda.
