2020 Mazda CX-5 vs Toyota RAV4

What's the difference?

I think it's fair to say the Mazda CX-5 has done about as much a single model line could have done for the population explosion of SUVs. The car is still selling like crazy when the economy isn't crippled by a global pandemic and that's despite the second-generation shuffling itself into more upmarket territory.

The CX-5 Akera is not the car people tend to go into Mazda dealers to buy without first doing their homework. Despite hardly anyone (relatively speaking) buying the Akera, you have a choice of three engines, the naturally aspirated petrol, the turbo-petrol and the turbo-diesel (in ascending price order).

The latter two both start at over $50,000. You can't spend that much on a Tucson or a Sportage, or even a RAV4. So you're going to want to know what you're getting yourself into, right?

Fun, Toyota, and hybrid are not words you often see together. Even two out of those three aren't obvious sentence-fellows. The Japanese giant spends a lot of money to convince us its cars are fun (and an equal amount telling us that daggy dads buy them) but as new cars roll on to dealer forecourts, there is more than a flicker of hope.

You see, the old RAV4 was perhaps one of my least favourite cars. Ponderous and boring but hard to ignore because of its obvious quality and longevity. I just couldn't click with it because it felt like it was targeted at the daggy dads in the ads as though they didn't deserve any better. That might be over-thinking it, but that's a glimpse inside my automotive head.

It might not be an overthink, though, because the petrol RAV4 Edge I drove last year was a vast improvement, not just on the RAV4, but on most Toyotas I had driven in the previous decade.

Something's up. Can the base model RAV4 Hybrid make all three of those words believable in the same sentence?