It's been a little over a year since I bought a CX-70. Overall, I really like it: it's comfortable, handles well, looks great inside and out, has enough cargo space for my needs, and is able to pull my 3500 pound travel trailer with ease. But there are a few things that a really don't like, to the extent that Mazda might not be on my list the next time I look for a car.
I've listed them here in increasing order of annoyance.
Turning off the stereo
There have been a lot of professional reviewers slamming the infotainment unit. I'm going to focus on one very small part of it, that nonetheless makes me grumble every time I use it: turning the stereo off so that it stays off.
The Mazda has three ways to turn off the stereo. The first is the mute button: press the small round knob in the center console and the sound stops. But if you turn off the engine it's back on as soon as you start up again. If you hold down that button, you turn off the infotainment system entirely. It won't turn on again the next time you get in the car, but you also can't use the navigation system or even see the current time.
If you actually want to turn off just the stereo, you must press the large button, to bring up a menu. Then select “Audio Sources” from the that menu. Then scroll to the very end of that list where there's an “Audio Off” menu item. Finally, press the large button to select that item.
As I see it, there are two easy solutions: either remember the setting of the mute, or move “Audio Off” to the very top of the audio menu.
“Upcoming exits” navigation sub-panel
One of the reasons that I bought the CX-70 was that it had a built-in navigation system. And while “Miss Google” is easier to use and gives better directions, I've been in many places without Internet connectivity (and where I might not have already downloaded maps). I also like the navigation screen as a default display.
But then I get on a highway, and the system shows a list of upcoming exits with their distance and estimated ETA, blocking the right third of the screen. In principle, I might like such a list, if it showed the exit names and I could scroll through them to highlight the exit I wanted. But it doesn't, and I can't, and more importantly, I can't make it go away. The UI indicates that I should be able to do that: there's a downward pointing arrow at the top of the widget, which I would interpret as “minimize this window,” but I have not found any way to activate that control (if control it is).
If you go into the navigation menus, there's an sub-menu for what appears on the sidebar. I've told it to show nothing, but that doesn't disable the exit list. Clearly the team that put that checkbox in place never talked to the team that implemented the exit sidebar.
Repeated warning messages
When the CX-70 wants to tell you something, it blanks out most of the instrument console to do so. And requires you to press the "Info" key on the steering wheel to make the message go away.
Sometimes, this is annoying, as when it tells me that my windshield washer fluid is low (especially annoying because that message appears when the fluid is half empty, due to the design of the reservoir). And sometimes it's downright dangerous, such as when it told me — in separate messages — that my front collision avoidance system was no longer operational because I was driving in a torrential downpour. Seeing your gauges replaced by a big warning box is guaranteed to attract your attention, even if you have none to spare.
What raises this behavior to major annoyance is that the conditions that trigger the message reset: in the case of the torrential downpour, once I got out of a rain band the sensors would detect that they could see what was in front of me, and the collision avoidance system would be re-enabled. Only to be disabled again, with two messages, when I entered the next rain band.
Aside from the danger and annoyance, repeated messages desensitive users. After passing through two or three rain bands that day, I forced myself to ignore the messages flashing on my screen. Which, of course, meant that I wouldn't see a truly important message, such as dangerously low tire or oil pressure.
My recommendation here is simple: only show a message once per drive. Assume that I know there's a problem until I turn off the engine. Unfortunately, I think this is unlikely to happen, for the same reason that the CX-70's Owner's Manual prefaces every feature description with a warning that in effect says “don't rely on this feature.”
Rear auto-braking due to bicycle rack
A friend of mine has a Jeep Wrangler. When he shifts into reverse with a hitch-mounted bicycle rack, the car starts beeping. The CX-70 goes one step further: it slams on the brakes. I first discovered this “feature” on our first long trip, trying to turn around in a narrow dead-end street. Even if you're moving at a slow walking speed, suddenly slamming on the brakes will bounce your head off the seatback (try it!). When that happens every few feet, it's infuriating.
There is a way to turn this feature off, buried in the menu system. But it is a useful feature, so I don't want to turn it off permanently. This would be a perfect place for the warning system I described in the last section: apply the brakes (once), display a message, and then ignore the situation once the driver acknowledges the message (this is one case where the acknowledgment should not last for the entire drive).
I ended up solving the problem with a hack. We have the factory installed trailer hitch, which disables the rear warning systems when you plug in a trailer's umbilical. So I bought a set of magnetic towing lights (used when you're towing another car or a utility trailer that doesn't have lights), and plug them in whenever we have the bicycle rack installed.
Driver personalization system
Everything up to this point has been an annoyance that, on balance, I can live with This “feature” is the reason that I don't think that I'll buy another Mazda.
Like many upscale cars, the CX-70 can save your preferences for seat, steering wheel, and mirror position. There are two buttons on the dash; one for myself, the other for my wife. And if that was all the CX-70 provided, I would be happy. But Mazda decided to add the “Driver Personalization System,” which uses facial recognition to figure out who is driving the car.
It's cool technology, right? What could go wrong? The answer: a lot.
First off, it takes a subjectively long time to figure out who the driver is in the best of cases. Objectively, I've timed it as over 10 seconds in the worst case. It doesn't seem to work at all if you have the camera display turned on. And if you shift into gear without waiting for it to finish, it gives up.
Second, it's not very good: at least half the time it doesn't figure out that it's me, even though I've “trained” it with multiple postures, with and without sunglasses. To get a good reading, you must stare at the infotainment screen and remain rigidly in place, like you're posing for an 1800s photo. Even then, the failure rate is pretty high.
Third, it appears to operate asynchronously. Not a problem, except when the ”don't look at the infotainment unit while driving” warning pops up (something that happens for every drive). If you acknowledge that warning, then the DPS seems to give up (or maybe it interprets the button press as accepting whatever driver it thinks you are).
None of this would be intolerable, if it simply defaulted to the previous driver's settings. But for some reason, Mazda decided to default to a “guest” setting. The point of this completely eludes me: if you're loaning your car to someone, why would they need their own configuration? And why would Mazda think that the next person to borrow the car would want the same settings?
And that brings me to the real problem: the Driver Personalization System doesn't just adjust the seat, mirrors, and steering wheel. It appears to remember every menu configuration item, from the position of the heads-up display (good) to the selected radio station and audio volume (not so good, although thankfully we don't have a teenager). Over the past year I've tried to make the guest settings the same as my normal settings, and every time I find a new one to change I curse the Mazda designers and developers.
So I have one recommendation: get rid of the friggin' “guest” mode and just default to the last driver.
Wrapping Up
I wrote this post at least partly to vent, and partly in the hope that a Mazda product manager might see it and instigate change (hey, it's worked for my posts critical of AWS services!).
But a bigger reason — and why it's on my programming-focused blog — is that each of these problems is a user interface failure. Likely caused by design and development teams that are working in isolation, trying to tick features off a product manager's list and meet an imposed deadline, without a QA team that acts as the voice of the customer. Fortunately, as software problems all of them can be corrected by that same development team, and installed during a scheduled service.
If enough people show their annoyance.
