Long-term test: Mazda CX-80 Homura Plus

Verdict

Mazda’s flagship SUV is a solid, spacious and slightly old-fashioned family SUV, but the old-school approach is a big positive for me. The PHEV isn’t the pick of the range, and although it can pay off in fuel savings, rivals do it better.

• Mileage: 6,578 miles
• Efficiency: 50.0mpg

The Mazda CX-80 is a car that seems perfectly aligned with the UK’s motoring public in 2026 – it can’t make up its mind between petrol and electric power. 

While the nation’s car buyers are scratching their heads and pounding their calculators trying to work out whether or not their next car should be an EV, the CX-80 plug-in hybrid makes both options available but often seems every bit as confused. 

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Mazda’s seven-seat SUV has been a great companion over the course of our long-term test; it’s big, practical, simple, sturdily built and an appealing alternative to its more extrovert rivals. You could say, it’s exactly the sort of car that would work a treat with a big diesel engine. Unfortunately, while Mazda does offer the CX-80 with its 3.3-litre e-Skyactiv D powertrain, we’ve got the somewhat indecisive PHEV. 

The CX-80 works fine in EV mode and when it’s relying exclusively on the petrol engine. Too often, however, it’s hesitant when it has to shuffle between the two. If you need to pull out of a junction quickly to take advantage of a gap in traffic or accelerate to join a motorway, it can feel like an old-school turbo engine that’s been caught off boost. You end up with a frustrating delay between your stomp on the throttle and anything much happening in terms of a response from the car. 

You do learn to drive around the issue, and dropping the powertrain into Sport mode helps by quickening up the responses too. 

The CX-80 is also much better when it doesn’t have to juggle its power sources. Select EV mode and it whirrs about the place sweetly with plenty of thrust for urban driving. When the battery’s flat, the petrol unit produces a lot less muscle but is much more predictable. It’s obviously noisier as well – with a tendency for the eight-speed gearbox to hold on to gears for too long and letting the revs rise as a result – but not intrusively so. 

For such a substantial vehicle, the CX-80 steers and corners well. You’ll get a comfier ride elsewhere in the big SUV class, because the bumps can certainly be felt on rough surfaces, but it doesn’t roll and wallow around like some more softly sprung rivals. You can certainly feel its size when you try to make swift changes of direction, but generally – as they tend to across Mazda’s model range – the engineers have got the balance about right.

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The CX-80 has confirmed that plug-in hybrids can make a lot of sense in big cars if you have the right usage patterns. Personally, I do a lot of return trips that are less than 10 miles long and can be done solely on electric power. The EV range you can expect from the Mazda varies, but around 20 miles is realistic in slow-speed, urban driving – and by relying on the battery I was able to average more than 100mpg for a few weeks in the winter. 

Longer journeys, where the petrol engine is typically returning 30 to 35mpg, quickly put a big dent in those numbers, but the CX-80 could certainly prove very cost-effective to run for the right owner. The official 176mpg WLTP test economy figure is pie in the sky, but I averaged 50mpg over my 4,000-plus  miles at the wheel of the Mazda.

As a family car, the CX-80 feels like a high-quality offering at its sub-£60,000 price point (our mid-range Homura Plus model costs £56,000 as tested). It’s not going to wow anyone with its technology or design but it feels well built, has lots of space and, most importantly, is easy to use. 

Driving a car that has physical buttons for the air-conditioning and a rotary dial to control the central display has only served to highlight to me how distracting the touchscreens are in some cars. The CX-80’s screen does accept finger presses when running Apple CarPlay or Android Auto so you can experience the two modes of operation side by side and I come down firmly in favour of physical controls. As a driver, they let you keep your eyes on the road more of the time and that’s got to be a good thing.

Mazda CX-80 Homura Plus: third fleetwatch

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Regardless of its size, the CX-80 PHEV is proving to be an efficient family car

The Mazda CX-80 has set a new record for indicated fuel economy in the past few weeks: 169mpg, which is tantalisingly close to the official 176.6mpg claim.

This feat of fuel-sipping was achieved over a couple of weeks where the CX-80 hardly exceeded its 25 to 30-mile EV range. 

It’s a good example of how efficient a big car with a PHEV powertrain can be if you charge it. When the battery is flat, 35mpg is more realistic and you’ll wonder why you didn’t get an EV, or even a diesel.

Mazda CX-80 Homura Plus: second fleetwatch

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I got three bikes in Mazda’s massive CX-80, then smacked my head on the tailgate

A bike rack would definitely have been preferable, but when you have a car as big as the Mazda CX-80, you can get away without one. The plug-in hybrid SUV is a whisker under five metres long and makes good use of the space its chunky dimensions create on board. 

I managed to carry three bikes (two adult size and one kids’, all with the wheels off) and three passengers without too much grief. The seats fold down easily, but it would be nice to have switches to drop the middle row down from the load area, as many rivals do. 

Once you’ve lowered them, the space is massive, at 1,971 litres, with a flat floor and a nice square opening. There’s even a 258-litre boot in the CX-80 with all seven seats in use, although the floor space available is only around 50cm deep at its widest point, so you’ll need to stack cargo to make full use of the capacity. 

There’s space under the floor for a couple of charging cables. I like the fact that Mazda included a 12V socket and two three-pin plug sockets in the boot area, for charging and even potentially running electrical appliances off the car’s battery.

One gripe is that the tailgate doesn’t raise all that high when it’s open, partly due to the CX-80 being only 1,710mm tall, which is less than a lot of seven-seat SUVs.

I measured the tailgate at five foot eight inches off the ground, so anyone much taller than that is going to be at risk of hitting their head while loading the car.

Mazda CX-80 Homura Plus: first fleetwatch

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First fleetwatch report: Mazda’s large SUV may be almost 5 metres long and well over 2 tonnes, but it doesn’t feel like it

At five millimetres shy of five metres long and a shade over 2,300kg, I’m sure Mazda’s CX-80 won’t be offended if we describe it as a bit of a whopper. 

Yet it doesn’t really carry itself like a heavyweight SUV. It lacks an imposing presence, partly, I think, because at 1,710mm tall it’s not as high as the likes of a Range Rover Sport (1,820mm) or a Mercedes GLE (1,782mm). Many will like the low-key, jacked-up estate-car looks, but you do lose the enhanced visibility that a higher driving position brings. 

Overall, though, the CX-80 isn’t too cumbersome navigating tight streets, multi-storey car parks and the like. Its bonnet is long, but you get a reasonable view out of the rear as long as the third-row seats aren’t in use. And if you’ve remembered to charge the PHEV’s battery, it glides about very elegantly on electric power, staying nicely under the radar for such a big beast.  

Mazda CX-80 Homura Plus: second report

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Our CX-80 emerges from its first service with flying colours. If only there were a few more in the cabin

• Mileage: 5,532 miles
• Efficiency: 49.2mpg

It comes to every motorist eventually – the orange spanner lighting up on their car’s dash to say it’s service time. It happened when our Mazda CX-80 had done just over 5,000 miles and was only a couple of months into its time with us, but Mazda likes its new cars to come back every 12,500 miles or 12 months and the car had just passed its first birthday. 

As you’d expect, the first service on the seven-seat SUV is more of a gentle check-up (costing £297) and a clean bill of health was handed over by Jenson, the service advisor at TW White and Sons Mazda in Bookham, Surrey. 

While I was at the dealership, I had a poke around a CX-80 with the white Nappa leather interior option you get with Takumi trim. Our Homura Plus spec car’s jet-black colour scheme is classic Mazda, but it does make for a gloomy feel inside – especially in the rear seats. The white leather solves this at a stroke, but then there’s the issue of keeping it clean. 

It’s a matter of personal taste, but I was struck by how much more airy and modern the CX-80 cabin feels with the lighter trim. The selection also brings pale wood finishes on the centre console and doors, plus light fabric on the dash, all of which contrast markedly with the coal-hole approach on our car. Perhaps a half-way colour option in a mid-shade would have made sense, but with the CX-80 cabin, it literally is black or white. 

The black leather and chrome trim isn’t the only thing about our CX-80’s interior that has an old-school feel. Mazda launched this car in 2024, but the control system feels a generation behind most rivals – in a good way. 

If you’re one of the people frustrated by the over-reliance on touchscreens in modern cars, the CX-80 will be a breath of fresh air. It has a panel dedicated to heating and ventilation controls with buttons to press and a digital display that’s constantly in view. It’s crazy that I’m writing this in 2026, but a feature that was once standard in almost every car now feels like a novelty after so many brands have hidden key controls in touchscreen menus in the name of minimalist – and cheaper to manufacture – cabin designs.  

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The CX-80, like many modern Mazdas, also retains a chunky dial to control the menu systems on the main touchscreen. While Mazda’s menu system is well configured for use with the central control dial, if you connect your phone to use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, these work better with touchscreen inputs. 

One issue we found is that the CX-80’s dark on-screen graphics mean there’s no real need for a ‘dark mode’ when driving at night. When you’re using Android Auto, however, the lighter graphics mean you have to manually switch the screen brightness down to avoid being dazzled by your own sat-nav. 

Mazda would like to be seen as a premium brand and the CX-80’s interior can stand comparison with rivals in that sector. It feels robustly built but the materials’ quality, the dark colour scheme on all but the top-spec cars, and the lack of standout tech or design features may hold it back for some buyers. 

For me, the appeal is Mazda’s commitment to go its own way. This is a large and roomy seven-seat SUV, but the modest exterior styling helps it go under the radar and the interior is more focused on usability than wow-factor. 

You get very good legroom for adults in the second row, and the third-row seats are good for the class, once you’ve clambered into them. A 687-litre boot with the third row down, or 258 litres with it up, are also decent showings.

Mazda CX-80 Homura Plus: first report

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With a shiny new long cable at the ready, we’re charging into life with the seven-seat CX-80 plug-in hybrid

• Mileage: 2,423 miles
• Efficiency: 44.2mpg

Plug-in hybrids are the car world’s ultimate compromise. Two power sources are merged and crammed into a single car, which takes on a strange third character – not quite that of a petrol car, not quite that of an EV but capable of delivering the best and worst bits of both. With the Mazda CX-80’s arrival on our long-term test fleet, I am committed to doing it right. 

That really means charging, and lots of it. When the 17.8kWh battery that underpins the electric part of the powertrain is flat, all its EV tech becomes very heavy luggage that the CX-80’s poor-old 2.5-litre petrol engine has to haul around. The secret to getting the most out of any PHEV is to keep that battery brimmed as much as possible, and I’m lucky enough to have a home charger to do it with.

As soon as I heard I would be getting the keys to the CX-80 Homura Plus long-term test car, I could hear the distant rattle of the first big problem coming down the tracks. I drove a Mazda MX-30 for six months in 2021 and learned then that Mazda favours charging cables of the shorter variety. 

A three-metre cable would be no issue for most prospective owners, but for me? Well, let’s just say that when your home charger installer asks whether you want the wallbox located five metres away from your parking space to save running an ‘unsightly’ cable down the side of the house, say “no”. 

After I made that foolish decision, cars with shorter cables force me into all kinds of elaborate multi-point turns, depending on where their charging flap is located. With the CX-80 being a 4,995mm-long, seven-seat SUV, those manoeuvres would have had to be worthy of the Red Arrows, so I bit the bullet and went on eBay for one of Tesla’s gorgeous 7.5-metre-long charging cables. I paid £60 for a used item but Mazda does offer brand new equivalents for £207, which seems reasonable.

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I’m now in the position to charge the Mazda CX-80 as the manufacturer intended (a lot) with minimal faff. And it’s a good job because the car is currently delivering only about 22 miles of its official 38-mile WLTP electric range before it declares the battery is too depleted to power the car on electricity alone. 

It’s early days and my daily driving – a school run with a giant hill in the middle – is notoriously unfavourable to EV efficiency, yet I saw 145mpg on the trip computer in the first week. Stay tuned for more news of the CX-80’s performance in EV and hybrid modes.

So charging aside, what else can I say about the CX-80? The 323bhp power output with 500Nm of torque sounds like a lot, but it has a 2,300kg SUV to contend with. The 0-62mph dash is over pretty rapidly, in 6.8 seconds, but Mazda’s famous sporty DNA isn’t evident.

This car costs £56,530 in mid-range Homura Plus trim, with just one option fitted: Melting Copper paint, at £650. The only free colour option is Arctic White, while Mazda’s trademark Soul Red Crystal paint is £900. But that might be a bit much on a car of the CX-80’s bulk, anyway.  

There’s an intriguing no-cost option to have two captain’s chairs in the middle row instead of the bench seat for walk-through access, but we didn’t go for that. What we have got is a panoramic sunroof that lets some extra light into the sombre interior. 

If anything, the cabin feels a little old-fashioned, but don’t knock it. In the first few days with the car, having a bank of physical buttons for the climate controls and a rotary knob for the unfussy infotainment system has been a revelation. Just like the old days when plugging in an electric vehicle was an experience only enjoyed by milkmen.

*Insurance quote from AA (0800 107 0680) for a 42-year-old in Banbury, Oxon, with three points.

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