Road-Tripping Our 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV: The Best and Worst Parts

When it comes to road-tripping, many people prefer the comfort and spaciousness of a three-row SUV. So how has our yearlong review 2024 Mazda CX-90 plug-in hybrid fared in the hands of the MotorTrend crew over the course of a year? Once again, we have a mixed bag.

Our CX-90 PHEV’s seats set us up for a good start. They’re incredibly comfortable (even on long stints), with good support and no pressure or pain points. Seats are the one point on which every editor who has spent time in our Mazda agrees. Augmenting the comfort level is an optional digital instrument display that doesn’t bombard you with too much information. 

Although this Mazda isn’t a class leader in terms of space, there’s plenty of room for gear. The CX-90 started its MotorTrend stint with a cross-country trip from Los Angeles to Detroit with a full cargo area’s worth of Pelican cases, photography and test gear, suitcases, and other supplies. With the second and third rows folded flat, swallowing the gear was a snap.

Testing director Eric Tingwall took his family on a ski trip and enjoyed plenty of space for duffel bags full of ski gear, a cooler, and a Pack-N-Play for the baby. Numerous trips to cabins up north have further confirmed its utility.

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A Joy to Drive?

If your typical road trip is a series of nice, sweeping curves, the CX-90 can be a delight, but some of our drivers lamented it provides a stiffer ride than Mazdas we’ve enjoyed in the past. Sport mode gave the Mazda additional spirit when passing big-rigs, and we appreciated its all-wheel drive when roads took on a layer of icy mush, as the system was quick to figure out low-traction situations on snow/dirt roads.

But most travels are long highway slogs, and this is where this family crossover doesn’t shine. The culprit: The steering and lane keep assist hurt more than they help.

As we’ve found in previous Mazda yearlong reviews, the CX-90’s steering is inexplicably heavy. “It’s especially egregious in parking lots,” Tingwall said. “I'm not exactly jacked, but I do swim more than 2 miles multiple times a week. I can't imagine what the typical female driver would make of it. It's bizarre because heavy steering is uncharacteristic of Mazda, which has traditionally encouraged light and precise controls for a sporty feeling.” Tingwall is not alone. All of our staffers have found it can be tiring both trying to stay centered on a long trip and avoiding drifting too close to the lane lines, which triggers warning beeps and messages to take a break. 

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Steering and Lane Keep More Hindrance Than Help

The steering wonkiness is exacerbated by Mazda’s bizarre lane keeping assist logic, which sort of locks the steering at dead center position. 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 a steering input. Then you repeat the whole process in the opposite direction. As a result, you’re forced to make constant steering corrections because of the lane keeping system. The issue is worsened in snowy and icy conditions, where the jerkiness and inability to easily hold a straight line feels dangerous. One editor reported an incident on a dirt road with no lane markings where the vehicle wanted to veer off the road for no reason.

Tingwall found that things got better when he disabled a slew of features—lane keep assist, lane departure warning, and emergency road departure warning. He isn’t alone. Most of us found the lane keep aggressive and annoying to the point where we had to turn it off, defeating the purpose of its existence. For those who want to do the same, go into the settings, find safety settings and then safety alerts to turn off the warnings. Go to collision avoidance in the safety settings to turn off road keep assist, blind-spot assist, and lane keep assist. Once off, they remain off until you change the settings again.

On a more positive note, the cruise control’s speed-limit following system works well. Setting a +10-mph offset and touching the resume button when the limit changes sets the speed to 10 over the new limit. The prompts appear on the head-up display and the instrument cluster. Better still, the HUD remains visible with polarized sunglasses.

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Towing With Our CX-90 Plug-In Hybrid

We’ve done some light towing with our CX-90 plug-in hybrid, which is rated to tow up to 3,500 pounds. Unfortunately, the outside 120-volt power outlets at our northern retreat wouldn’t charge the SUV's hybrid battery, so the towing effort was all engine. Even so, the SUV didn’t break a sweat towing a light utility trailer with a riding lawnmower, which weighed about 2,000 pounds. Despite the depleted battery, our experience has been that the CX-90 doesn’t feel torquier when it has its full 25 miles of range on tap. The engine comes on easily, especially in winter when we couldn’t run on electricity only and still heat the cabin. Having the PHEV battery does add weight to the CX-90, but it still didn’t feel labored pulling the mower and trailer.

One final weird road-tripping quirk: The CX-90 doesn’t seem to know where it is. Driving in Michigan, we got repeated messages warning us of severe thunderstorms in Ohio and other states. The messages are persistent, which is great if you’re in the danger zone but annoying when you have to keep acknowledging something that’s hundreds of miles from affecting you.

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

• 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? 

• This Transmission Leaves Much to Be Desired 
• 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 
• The Pros and Cons of CX-90 PHEV Ownership