The Hits and Misses of Our 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV After Nearly a Year of Testing

Our long-term 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV  is a surprisingly polarizing member of our Detroit-area yearlong review fleet. For every lovely feature, there’s another aspect that drives us crazy and makes us want to hand off the keys to someone else—a surprise to us, given the enthusiasm with which we welcomed this three-row plug-in hybrid SUV into our fleet.

Here is a scorecard of some of our CX-90’s hits and misses.

Greatest Hits

Pretty: On one thing we can all agree on: This is a pretty SUV inside and out. We especially love its deep blue crystal mica paint and sporty silhouette. It also has a bright and airy interior with fine leather, wood, and rich materials.

Comfortable Seats: The seats have proven quite comfortable on long stints with good support and no pressure or pain points.  

Cruise Control Speed-Limit System: This works well. You can set a 10-mph offset with the speed limit, and when the limits change, a box around the speed limit sign appears that reads RES. This indicates that touching the resume button will change the set speed to 10 over the new limit. The message appears on the head-up display as well as on the instrument cluster.

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Head-Up Display: It’s visible, though dimmed, with polarized glasses, which isn’t something every automaker’s HUD can claim.

Door Cupholders: The cupholders in the doors can accommodate a 36-ounce water bottle, which ends up rolling around the footwell in most cars.

All-Wheel Drive: The Mazda’s AWD system is quick to figure out low-traction situations on snow or dirt roads and performs well when you need it to. Off-Road mode takes the responsiveness out of the pedal, which is helpful.

PHEV Graphics: The graphics clearly indicate the point at which your power request will ignite the engine. We also like that the screen shows you vehicles around you. It would be even better if the picture of a vehicle didn’t disappear as it approaches the blind spot.

Range: For some drivers, 26 miles of EV-only range (under perfect weather conditions) is enough for daily errands, and the CX-90 will drive up to 85 mph in EV mode.

Biggest Misses

Transmission: We’ve gotten used to our CX-90’s eight-speed automatic transmission, but that doesn’t mean its behavior has become any more excusable. It will still shudder, hesitate, and make hard and abrupt shifts, especially at low speeds. It really stumbles during the transition from EV to hybrid operation, when it seems to cut electric power and then suddenly feeds in the gas engine with too much torque. The issue: a wet multi-plate clutch setup that forgoes a conventional torque converter in order to meld gasoline and electric power in this Mazda-designed and -engineered transmission.

Steering: As in many recent Mazdas, the CX-90’s is inexplicably heavy, making it downright fatiguing on a long journey. It’s especially egregious in parking lots. Mazdas in the past were known for light and precise controls, offering a sporty feeling.

Lane Centering: This continues to be a Mazda weak spot. Our CX-90's lane keeping assist is aggressive to the point where you want to turn it off, along with the lane warning that beeps warnings too easily. The lane keep assist sort of locks the steering at the dead-center position so when you try to make a minor correction, you have to overcome some sticky resistance and then the assist system abruptly lets go, causing you to make too big of a steering input. The result is constant steering corrections as you fight to drive in a straight line, ironically because of the lane keeping system. 

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Stiff Ride: One of the things we loved most about the CX-90’s predecessor, the CX-9, was that it made three-row SUVs fun to drive. The CX-90, however, lacks that special sauce.

Gearshift Design: There’s a lot of hate for a design that forces you to pause in reverse on the way to drive and vice versa on the return to reverse before shifting left for park—a recipe for someone accidently leaving the car in reverse because the instinct is to slide the shifter straight up, but that is reverse. You have to go up and then to left for park. You’d think we’d be used to this after over a year behind the wheel, but clearly we aren’t.

Electric Range: Yes, it’s listed as a hit and a miss. Snowbelt weather has revealed the CX-90’s range to be too small for us. In the winter, a whole night’s charge might get us 14 miles of range at best. This could be why some people buy plug-ins and don’t bother plugging them in.

Touchscreen: It only functions as a touchscreen when using Apple CarPlay or Android Auto; otherwise, you have to use the Mazda rotary-push control, and it’s frustrating. Finding a new radio station that isn’t a preset is a confounding multi-step process. CarPlay can also be spotty; it doesn’t always reconnect when you get back into the CX-90, and it often won’t pair the phone again, insisting there are too many devices already listed (including your own, which it won’t reconnect to). Another annoyance: If CarPlay is enabled and the owner uses the phone for something else, it cuts off satellite radio. For example, if your passenger grabs your phone to check email, the radio often gets cut off.

Wireless Charger: This is hit or miss. Most of the time it blinks the angry red light and flashes a message that it’s unavailable. It does heat up the phone, however, even if it doesn’t charge it.

Windshield Wipers: These can’t be raised without executing the complicated “service mode,” which would allow us to pre-deploy our wipers when parked overnight prior to a snowfall. For cold climes, it would be nice to be able to just flip them up and down.

Blind-Spot Detection: The light on the mirror sometimes sticks on, showing phantom vehicles that aren’t there.

We’re approaching the end of our time with the Mazda CX-90. We’ll let you know, in the end, if we will miss it, but much to our surprise, it doesn’t look promising.

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More on Our 2024 Mazda CX-90 Long-Termer:

• 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV Yearlong Review Arrival: Feeding My Mazda Habit
• A Cold Cross-Country Trek in Our 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV Gets Into Tire Trouble
• How Do Cold and Snow Affect Our 2024 Mazda CX-90 Plug-In Hybrid?
• Our 2024 Mazda X-90 PHEV’s Transmission Leaves Much To Be Desired
• 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV Yearlong Review: Who Decided This Stuff?
• Mission Premium: Mazda Set Out to Take the CX-90 PHEV Upscale. Did it Succeed?
• Our Mazda CX-90 Has Had a Lot of Recalls—But One Fixed the Most Dangerous Problem