2018 Mazda CX-9 vs 2021

What's the difference?

The Christmas holidays aren’t a holiday – it’s hard work with the shopping, the families, the food, the ‘festiveness’ and the heat. You come out the other side more exhausted than you did going in.

Which is why my wife and I (well, it was really her) decided to be smart for once and take a week off with our toddler before Santa Day. We headed down to Jervis Bay from Sydney. I had an ulterior motive as well – to test the new Mazda CX-9. The largest SUV from Mazda underwent an update this year which brought new safety tech and practicality features.

I was looking forward to this – road testing a CX-9 packed to the brim with holiday gear. See, although we make the test vehicles part of our daily lives, often it’s just myself in the car - apart from the weekend and the daycare run. So how would the CX-9 handle, ride, steering and brake packed full of suitcases, a week’s shopping, eskies, beer, toys and people – well, the three of us?

Sure I was working on a holiday, but car journos are like cops, we’re never really off-duty.

The second-generation Mazda CX-9 may have been on sale in Australia for nearly five years now, but it remains the second best-selling large SUV using unibody construction (as opposed to old-school, off-road-focused body-on-frame).

That said, it is getting on a bit, so Mazda’s given it an update with a twist for 2021, hoping to inject a little bit more life into its flagship model.

And when we say twist, we mean it. After all, who would’ve thought there’d ever be a six-seat CX-9? Well, we’ve checked it out to see if it’s the version we needed all along. Read on.