Mazda 6e review

Your very first impression is one of luxury, the 6e’s doors being frameless like a sports car (or old Subaru), while its materials and general ambience feel good once you’re ensconced inside. While we don’t intimately know its Changan donor car, the new Mazda costume is superficially convincing – no matter how naff the two-spoke steering wheel looks.

But then you engage with its two screens and the impression shifts. Dramatically. The digital instruments are integrated nicely into the cowl, and look less tacked-on than many rivals, but the display itself lacks flair. The enormous 14.6in touchscreen is much less politely slung onto the dashboard and sticks too closely to the Tesla script of being an on-board computer stuffed full of menus rather than a place to naturally interact with a motor car. And if you spend more than a couple of seconds trying to operate it, it’ll shout at you for not paying attention to the road. Groan.

The OS itself is speedy enough and highly legible, and the native sat nav is serviceable. But there’s so much junk functionality that you don’t need. Genuinely, who is the energy management graph for? Why are hours measured to the nearest decimal place on the trip computer? Who’s going to use the rest, relax, privacy or fresh air modes? All symptomatic of a system that suffers from a criminal lack of overarching thought.

Take the driving settings as an example: the acceleration can be set to medium or sport; the power steering to normal or sport; the regen low, standard, middle or high. Madness. Imagine going into Next and finding the T-shirts are marked XS, Average, Slack, and Big Daddy.

We have to give Mazda some leeway because you can add your own shortcuts to your most-used settings, but taken at face value the screen is borderline dangerous to use on the move. A Mazda ought to be class-leading for ease of use, and this is the opposite. What a shame.

Crikey. Spacious though, right?

Oh it’s roomy alright, with decent passenger space front and rear and a 72-litre frunk to complement its 336-litre boot. The latter is accessed via a full-size hatchback for extra practicality; flip the back seats down and you can carve out 1,074 litres of volume.

You’ll get plenty of odds ’n’ ends in the central storage box (awkwardly unlocked by a side latch), and you get cupholders and space to lay two smartphones. Mercifully, the air vents are manually operated although the fan speed and climate control all live in the touchscreen.

A vast, tinted glass roof casts a pleasing glow over the cabin while the windscreen and side glass serve up decent visibility before you’ve even begun to exploit the 360-degree camera — that’s especially handy for reversing, but the ‘Please Stop!’ graphic that pops up when you’re close to hitting something is faintly comical.

The rear window is a tiny sliver, mind, one that's heavily eaten into if you indulge in Mazda’s first adaptively extending rear spoiler. Odd place to debut it, we’d argue…