A mere facelift shouldn't be this much better - New 2024 Mazda CX-5 is how you do quiet luxury, at a price your financial adviser will approve

Mazda is not a brand that sits on the pantheon of automotive luxury worshipped by the masses, and rightly so. But step back for one moment and ask yourself what defines a luxury product?

Unlike fashion apparel, it’s very difficult to properly define what constitutes a luxury car due to the complexity of putting together tens of thousands of components to build a car.

Does a Volkswagen model suddenly become a luxury car when it wears the four-ring logo (Audi Q2 and its twin the VW T-Roc)? What about when a Renault-powered Mercedes-Benz (M282 engine)? Or BMW’s MINI that is now built by China’s Great Wall Motor?

This may be counter intuitive, a luxury product is never defined by its brand, but by how the matrix of high-quality materials, craftsmanship, aesthetic appeal, and exclusivity, come together to deliver a unique ownership experience.

The reason why a brand is not a marker of luxury products is simple: a brand’s image is fluid and changes with time, but good aesthetics and quality craftmanship are timeless. Not everything with a luxury brand on it is a luxury product.

The Grand Seiko is a good example of how a genuine luxury product transcends brand. It’s a highly coveted timepiece despite wearing a rather common Seiko brand.

Then, you also have affordable luxury products that blur the line between mainstream and core luxury. The Seiko Presage, which sits below the Grand Seiko is one example, though some collectors will have strong opinions against this.

The Mazda CX-5 is a bit like a higher-end Seiko. Like a Seiko, a Mazda is relatively accessible so you can’t call the CX-5 a luxury product. Yet, a lot of the CX-5’s attributes make you question this ingrained belief system on what constitutes a luxury car.

Pragmatic buyers who care more about quality than snob appeal will buy them because they are still reasonably priced, are a bit more exclusive, and are very refined.

At a glance, the new 2024 Mazda CX-5 may not appear very different from before, but you just need to drive it for a few kilometres to realize that the ride is so much more comfortable than before.

Look around the CX-5’s cabin, and you can clearly tell that your money is well spent. The materials are of higher quality than many entry-level German luxury models, the controls are intuitive to use, and, more importantly to people who love Mazdas, it’s dynamically superior to its rivals.

The CX-5 also doesn’t beat you into submission to adapt to its tech features. Instead, the car is designed around you, to make things easy for you.

While other manufacturers force you to work the menus on an oversized touchscreen, while driving, the CX-5’s features are controlled via a high-quality bezel rotary dial and clearly labelled buttons. A familiar driver can operate them simply by tactile feel, without taking their eyes off the road.

Speaking of tactile feel, the materials and buttons inside a Mazda feel so good to touch because Mazda engineers do far more than luxury brands in getting this right. Did you know that Mazda uses a silicon model finger to measure how our fingertips register sensations when touching a Mazda’s interior?

Mazda engineers also measure test subjects’ heart rate, blood flow and perspiration levels before deciding on the right material for the steering wheel, or how much resistance should the rotary knob for the infotainment, or air-conditioning buttons have. Do German luxury brands do this? Maybe, but care to remind yourself what’s the price range of Mazda cars?

You push a button and get rewarded with a physical response, just like how you appreciate a handcrafted watch.

The CX-5’s driver’s seating position is the closest to our body’s ideal resting state – feet evenly stretched out, the steering wheel’s centre is pointed directly at your chest, while the seat shapes your spine into an ideal S-shape – the natural position of the human back, for minimum fatigue.

Achieving this level of perfection is extremely difficult due to constraints in packaging so many mechanical components – suspension, steering rack, infotainment and safety systems hardware, air-conditioning piping – between the engine’s bulkhead and dashboard.

The vehicle controls are so finely dialed in. Go, stop, turn – the three most basic of vehicle movements are executed in the CX-5 in one smooth motion, without any unnecessary movement of your upper body, especially your head.

Take the brake pedal for example. In most cars, there’s always a small but noticeable jerk when you come to a complete stop. This will happen even to the smoothest, most precise drivers. The next time you drive, pay attention to how your head moves right after the car brakes to a complete stop.

In the Mazda CX-5, this is usually an unavoidable jerk is almost eliminated. It’s not completely gone, but it’s extremely close to the braking smoothness of a Lexus ES, the only car we have reviewed that is able to do a true ‘limousine stop.’ What’s the price of a Lexus again?

Then there’s the 6-speaker audio system. The speakers don’t carry any big-name labels, but it’s surprisingly good. Sound reproduction is rich, with very good surround sound quality.

Also, did you know that no other manufacturer can produce steel body panels that curve and manipulate daylight reflection the way a Mazda can? It’s because the technology to stamp and mass produce steel body panels of such extreme curvatures, which requires stamping accuracy of 40 micrometres, half the thickness of a single hair strand – doesn’t exist.

Mazda’s body panels are too difficult for traditional steel press machines to produce in large quantities, but Mazda designers insist that changing the panel’s curvature by just 40 micrometers would “completely destroy” the body pane’s ability to manipulate light reflecting off the car’s body.

The curvature can only be realized by an expert Takumi master crasftsperson’s hands.

Most manufacturers would’ve just told the designers to shut up and compromise with the practical-minded production engineers. “The customer can’t tell the difference; it’s half the thickness of a hair goddamn it!” is what they will say.

But the people of Hiroshima who built and sustained Mazda are a bit too quirky and stubborn to compromise perfection, just like any genius artist.

Instead of accepting the reality of the factory floor’s limitations, Mazda’s production engineers developed a process that ‘taught’ robots to imitate the techniques of a Takumi, to shave and polish a steel panel to perfection.

In the process, they tried and tested 12,000 different grinding stones, before coming up with the ‘KODO toishi’ grinding stone which sharpens the surface 5 micrometers at a time.

Every manufacturer uses robots, but robots are dumb machines. No matter how good their artificial intelligence is, a machine is only as good as the human that ‘teaches’ the robot.

To scale up the skills of Mazda’s Takumi craftsmen and women, two other Mazda-patented robotized body shaping techniques were also developed.

‘KODO kezuri’ is a mechanized motion that imitates the hand movements of a Takumi clay modeler, while ‘KODO migaki’ is a tool that polishes the stamped metal’s delicately curved surface without distorting it.

This allows Mazda to mass produce shapes that were previously only possible with a delicate pair of Takumi’s hands.

Frankly, few customers can tell the difference, and that’s OK. You may not be able to immediately tell all these finer details of a Mazda from another car, but your body’s senses might just be able to feel it, and that’s what Jinba Ittai is all about – the one-ness between car and driver, designed around you.

A true luxury product is one that is created with passion, attention to detail, and a high level of quiet confidence. These values are all exemplified by the Mazda CX-5.

What we love about Mazda is that you can enjoy the result of all these artisanal passions and craftsmanship from just RM 144,469, the base 2.0G Mid variant. Our favourite of the CX-5 range is the 2.0G High. Priced from RM 161,469, it hits the sweet spot between value, features, and driving dynamics.

There’s the more powerful 2.5-litre High (from RM 174,960) and the turbocharged 2.5T AWD High (RM 188,760), but the lighter 2.0G High rides and drives better, and works best with the chassis setup, even if it’s not as fast.

The prices quoted are inclusive of a 5-year warranty and 5-year free service maintenance. The latter includes parts, labour, and lubricants.

You get all the features you want in the 2.0G High: LED headlamps with Mazda signature illumination; tilt and telescopic steering; leather seats; power adjustable driver’s seat with 2 memory positions; 6 speaker audio with wireless Apple CarPlay and wired Android Auto; 6 airbags; full suite of advanced driver assistance package including radar-guided adaptive cruise control, lane centering with steering assistance, and autonomous emergency braking in front and behind.

It’s a very comprehensive, well-balanced package for a fuss-free, family-friendly SUV, built by people who care very deeply about cars and take great pride in their work.

Find out more here.