Mazda MX-30 e-SKYACTIV 2021 Review

Never one to follow the crowd, Mazda has marched towards the looming EV battle with its arms waving oddly.

Wait, no. Those aren’t arms. They’re the doors of the 2021 Mazda MX-30.

Just like it did with its RX-8 sports coupe, Mazda has given the small, 4395mm-long MX-30 a pillarless body and rear-hinged ‘suicide’ rear doors. Mazda insists they open wider to make it easier for everybody to climb in and out. We’ll come back to this later, but they usually don’t.

But that’s not the contentious issue here. Instead, it’s range.

Mazda insists other car-makers put too much battery into their EVs and over-emphasise range, which leads to both cost and weight implications.

To counter this, Mazda hardly put any batteries in its EV, and gave it hardly any range.

The five-seat Mazda MX-30 has just 35.5kW of lithium-ion battery beneath its flat floor, which it claims is good for just 224km of NEDC range (or 200km on the WLTP standard).

It’s going to be a horses-for-courses deal, because it’s one thing if the car is going to be used for city or town commutes, but not much else.

The rear seats are, at best, cosy (and surprisingly so) for a 2655mm wheelbase, but the interior goes a long way to making up for it. It’s a wonderful place to be, with new materials that are largely recycled new tech on the multimedia side.

Mazda Australia hasn’t announced pricing for the pure electric version of the MX-30, which will first arrive here with a mild-hybrid SKYACTIV-G powertrain in April, followed later by a rotary range-extender powertrain.

However, we expect a pricetag of around $50,000 when the Mazda MX-30 EV arrives here around July.

This is the part where the 2021 Mazda MX-30 gets creative. The company points to studies in Japan as it searches for the sweet spot between expensive and heavy longer-range batteries and the perils of range anxiety.

Thus, the battery it uses is tiny. At 35.5kWh worth of 335V prismatic lithium-ion cells, its claimed range is shorter even than the range of the oft-criticised MINI Electric, the cutesy Honda E, the Renault ZOE or the Nissan LEAF, much less the more mature offerings from Volkswagen, Kia and Hyundai.

The upside to the obvious issues with an ultra-short range is ultra-short charging time and, for an EV, light weight.

At 1645kg, the Mazda MX-30 is lineball with plenty of traditional compact SUVs for mass, which lends Mazda other advantages in trickle-down areas like suspension, motors, brakes and even wheels.

There is a huge list of driver-assistance systems, from highways (not really an MX-30 thing) with lane-keeping and active cruise control, to more urban areas, with cross-traffic alerts for reversing or driving forward from blind carparks.

There’s a decent 366 litres of luggage capacity in the rear (though you generally have to pack around the two different charging cables) and that bumps up to 1171 litres when the seats are folded down.

Mazda knows how to do a big part of the motor/chassis/suspension compromise on the MX-30, because it’s been doing front-wheel drives with strut front-ends and torsion-beam rear-ends for decades now.

It’s just the new kind of ‘fuel’ tank and the packaging of the electric powertrain that has taken it some getting used to.

It’s clear where the upcoming hybrid MX-30 will put its rotary range-extending engine, because there is a ludicrous amount of free space lurking beneath the bonnet.

It’s a mechanic’s dream because they can tighten front subframe bolts while standing up. There’s enough space in there to swing a 6.6kW wallbox cable.

Limited to 140km/h, the MX-30’s electric motor delivers 107kW of power and 270.9Nm of torque.

It’s enough to pull to 100km/h in 9.7 seconds, but it never feels that slow thanks to its instant torque. It always feels as least ‘brisk’ and it delivers punch in a non-frightening way.

If it’s all new underneath, it’s not bad inside. The interior is clean, filled with more premium materials than we’re used to from Mazda (real, actual cork, for example) and it delivers a wonderful sense of space up front.

There are three digital screens here: a 7.0-inch one for the climate control, down low in the dash, an 8.8-inch infotainment unit up high in the middle and an easily legible screen in the instrument cluster.

There’s also a head-up display and, thankfully, a multimedia scroller in the console to navigate the big screen controls. There’s a reversing camera, 18-inch wheels and a clear sunroof, too.

In cold conditions (three degrees), we saw only a predicted 135km of range from a full charge in the Mazda MX-30. That’s the bad news, making a short range even shorter.

The good news is that a fortnight of urban driving in a normal routine found that it wasn’t a problem. The supermarket has a fast-charger, so we just plugged it in when we went shopping and it was charged when we returned.

So there’s that.

Highway driving ate the range very quickly, and the MX-30 didn’t much like living with Italy’s 130km/h speed limits (it’s limited at 140km/h).

The top of the speedo dial lists 80km/h, which feels like a strong subliminal hint about the practical maximum speed it was designed around.

There are five recharge modes you can reach on the steering-wheel paddles, and they range from the default mode to two ‘upshift’ sailing modes and two ‘downshift’ regeneration modes.

The regeneration modes are not overly aggressive, even at their strongest settings, and added precious range coming down the mountain on the way from my child’s school.

It always makes you smile when you come off the throttle or brake and the charging dial drops into the precious purple section that indicates the battery is receiving a drink of electrons.

Its light weight makes it a very handy handler for an EV, with the control weightings all feeling very similar to a combustion crossover, and it feels very stable in corners.

The Mazda MX-30 likes them long, but it nails the grippy turn-in, too, though it pays a price in ride quality. It’s firm.

The doors end up being the biggest issue and it’s hard to see how a conventional two-door bodyshell with a folding front seat would be any less convenient in a busy car park.

As it is, normal carparks see you open both doors carefully, let the youngling emerge from the rear, push him/her around your own body and up into the vee of the front doors before closing the rears before pushing her back (around you again) to get the front doors closed. It’s the Mazda Hokey Pokey.

It’s a huge miss that feels utterly unnecessary and ruins a charming car, though it would be fine for two adults who rarely carried a third person, of any size.

The 2021 Mazda MX-30 is an easy car to like, with upsides in its exterior look, its charming front-end, its wonderful dash layout and its ease of use.

The shortish range never became the issue I had been concerned about, though that may be more of hiccup with Australia’s more sprawled urban environs.

The doors don’t work, and it feels like Mazda caught itself between four- and two-door cabin lengths and didn’t leave itself much choice.

Its only other negative point is that the front suspension, in particular, is pretty firm over bumps, as though Mazda struggled to find the suspension compromise that worked for the lower centre of gravity.

The front suspension clunks loudly and irksomely if you cross a speed bump too quickly, as the wheels rebound downwards so fast that they bottom out the suspension travel.

It’s a slight concern that Mazda didn’t clean up all of its engineering goal conflicts like this one on the way to production.

But there is a lot more to love about the Mazda MX-30 than there is to dislike, and those issues only stand out because the rest of the car, inside and out, is so wonderfully charming.

How much does the 2021 Mazda MX-30 e-SKYACTIV cost?
Price: $TBC
Available: Q3 2021
Powertrain: Water-cooled AC synchronous motor
Output: 107kW/271Nm
Transmission: Single-speed reduction gear
Battery: 35.5kWh lithium-ion polymer
Range: 224km (NEDC), 200km (WLTP)
Energy consumption: 19kWh/100km (ADR)
Safety rating: Five-star (Euro NCAP 2020)

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