Hail the arrival of an all-new car, and hail the arrival, to go with it, of an all-new acronym. You’re thinking: it’s a smallish car with a lot of seats in it, so that would make it a small MPV, or multi-purpose vehicle, right? But you’re wrong. No such tired and misleading labels for the Mazda5. It’s a C-MAV, which translates as ”compact multi-activity vehicle”. (The hyphen, apparently, is silent.)
Compact multi-activity vehicle: it sounds vaguely military, doesn’t it? Kind of capable and attack-ready. Certainly excitingly various. It’s the description of a car that’s not going to back down in the face of life’s glorious challenge. So, let’s list, shall we, some of the world-embracing multiple activities you can get up to in your new Mazda5.
Well, first up, you can drive five children around in it. Alternatively, you can drive an adult and four children around in it. Or you could drive three adults and two children around in it. You could try driving one child and four adults, beside yourself, around in it, but that would mean that one of the adults was going to have to go in the third row of seats, and there is barely enough room back there to stick a photograph of a fully grown human, let alone an actual fully grown human, so the adult in question might not thank you for it — unless, that is, they enjoy ”making themselves as small as they can possibly be”, as they say in primary school music and movement classes, and then putting a seatbelt on.
Beyond that? Well, you can lose the seats and wedge the back with stuff. But from then on, the Mazda5 is struggling to impress. It’s not all-terrain. It doesn’t, at the touch of a button, sprout tunnelling equipment and bore through hillsides. Its capabilities are pretty much limited to people-carrying. Or, in the absence of people, stuff-carrying.
Of course, carrying people and stuff is no mean talent. If we’re being honest, it’s what most of us are hoping for from a car — a place for our people and our things that has an engine in it. Which makes the energy the motor industry puts into touting even its most modest cars as snowboard-holding, ski-ready, furiously adaptable ”lifestyle” choices for people on a permanent endorphin high all the more confusing.
The jangly term under which Mazda’s entire range of actually rather brilliant cars presently labours is ”Zoom-Zoom”. Here, courtesy of one of Mazda’s glossy showroom brochures, is a definition of ”Zoom-Zoom”: ”Deep inside us all, there’s a uniquely human emotion just waiting for an invitation to ‘come out and play’. It’s a feeling of pure exuberance and exhilaration — the emotion of motion. We call it Zoom-Zoom.”
Or consider the following fabulous vamping of the Mazda5’s inevitably somewhat cramped interior: ”All eight models of the Mazda5 feature a six-seat layout which focuses on the interior’s central space to promote good communication between all occupants.” In other words, there is bugger-all room in there, so you will all be talking directly into each other’s ears, whether you like it or not. Zoom-Zoom, indeed.
For some reason, on the back door of my perfectly acceptable, perfectly dutiful Mazda5, in chrome letters was the word ”Sport”. And yet I checked, and the car’s top didn’t come off and you couldn’t drive it with your backside anywhere near the tarmac. Neither could you put it around corners in such a way as to make your knuckles whiten and your passenger fumble for the doorhandle. And it didn’t have a noisy engine — well, no noisier than any other 2,0-litre diesel engine.
Driving the Mazda5 was only sport in the sense in which, say, pistol shooting is sport: we can all agree to call it as much, but we know we don’t really mean it because there is absolutely nothing going on there for spectators.
Strip away all the puffery and you are left holding the keys to a straightforward car that does a small set of simple and valuable things extremely well. Both rows of rear seating go backwards and forwards on smooth rails and collapse undemandingly into the floor. The car has a nicely weighted set of sliding doors at the back that go back far enough to make entering the very rear of the car plausible without six months of preparation under a yoga specialist. And when you fill the car with people with schoolbags, it still moves forwards and doesn’t sink with a groan into the road surface. What more could one reasonably ask for?
The emotion of motion? Sometimes just motion and an audible stereo will do. — Â