2018 Kia Sportage vs Mazda CX-3

What's the difference?

The SUV is just an evolution of the hatchback.

It’s hardly difficult to trace the lineage. Much like small sedans were the Neanderthals to the hatchback’s Homo Sapiens, hatchbacks themselves have become the prototype for something bigger, chunkier, more secure.

Are they really better though? Our Kia Sportage here is the middle of your average SUV range in 2018. It suits the ‘future hatchback’ paradigm to a T – with its accentuated proportions looking as though someone’s just put a hatchback in Photoshop and dragged it out diagonally.

To see if the Sportage offers anything more than a hatch, I took it on a 400km round-trip camping adventure from Sydney to the Wolgan Valley (around 180km north-west). My trip involved three passengers, a boot full of supplies and camping gear, as well as varied terrain including 15km of unsealed roads.

So, has the SUV earned its spot as the car market’s apex predator? And, is the SLi the pick of the Sportage range? Read on to find out.

If you're looking for the genesis of the small SUV apocalypse currently decimating small car sales, look no further than Mazda's CX-3.

Sure, others had done small SUVs earlier (the Kia Soul for one, and there were others), but it wasn't until the launch of Mazda's sleek little CX-3 - though don't let the numbers fool you, it's actually based on the Mazda2 - that the segment really got moving. 

Even now, several years after its launch, the CX-3 sits outright-second on the segment sales charts, a whisker behind the Mitsubishi ASX, and miles clear of its third-place rival. Which would normally be a cause for celebration in the Mazda camp. 

But there's a problem. Last year, the CX-3 was outright first. And so earlier this year, Mazda released a nipped-and-tucked version of its popular micro-SUV, presumably to try and improve its sales position by one.

So, we spent a week behind the wheel of the mid-spec (and most popular) CX-3 Maxx to see what's new.