2010 Mazda CX-7 Grand Touring
I forgot that the CX-7 is powered by the same 2.3-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine that was in the short-lived Mazdaspeed6 sport sedan. This engine's peaky, nonlinear character was one of the reasons that sedan didn't find an audience. It's better here in the CX-7 crossover, but it's not Mazda's best current powertrain effort. You can learn to live with it, to modulate the accelerator pedal, and to use the manual gate for the six-speed automatic, but all told, it's somewhat lacking.
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Other than that, I hadn't driven a CX-7 for a while and it's still a nice competitor to the Toyota RAV4, Hyundai Santa Fe, and the like. Our Grand Touring edition had a pleasant interior with heated seats, leather, automatic climate control, and the typical modern Mazda center stack design with a miniature nav system screen, a reasonable compromise.
Joe DeMatio, Executive Editor
It was a chilly 14 degrees on the evening I drove the CX-7. The leather seats were frigid and transmitted the chill straight through the seat of my pants. So I turned the seat heaters on full blast and fiddled with the rest of the controls - mirrors, steering wheel, radio - to get them set the way I like. By the time I was done with that, the seats had already started to heat up nicely, and the chill was waning. So - at least the seat heaters work quite well in the CX-7, thank you Mazda.
On my 10-mile short drive home, I encounter a fair amount of broken, uneven pavement, and the CX-7's ride quality over that kind of surface is a little rough. Of course, the fact that the Grand Touring model is fitted with 19-inch wheels likely contributes to this. Perhaps that's another reason that I (and, it appears, many of my colleagues) prefer the CX-7 with the 2.5-liter normally aspirated engine and 17-inch wheels.
Amy Skogstrom, Managing Editor
The turbocharger adds a little extra zoom to the CX-7's recipe, but I still prefer the normally aspirated 2.5-liter four-cylinder we tested earlier this year in a front-wheel-drive CX-7. It was not only less expensive and less peaky than this Grand Touring, but the SV I still carried some nice features, and remarkably, wasn't any less sharp or fun to drive.
Front-wheel-drive, coupled with traction control and a good set of all-season or snow tires, should be enough to get you through most slippery situations, but if you absolutely need your next compact crossover to have all-wheel-drive and a turbocharger, I'd take a good long look at Subaru's Forester--which felt peppier, at least--before settling down with a CX-7 like this.
Evan McCausland, Web Producer
