2018 Mazda CX-9 vs Nissan Pathfinder

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.

It’s a tight tussle for a slice of the red-hot seven-seater SUV market segment, and Nissan’s Pathfinder is still trying to gain a decent foothold there. 

Strange, because this is a big, smooth-driving, highly functional, family friendly wagon. Last year the Pathie was updated with a new V6 petrol engine, styling tweaks and new safety tech, but have any of those changes really bolstered the appeal of what has been a solid but overlooked model? Read on.