Long-term test: Mazda CX-80 Homura Plus

Verdict

Mazda shuns the fashionable touchscreen-centric approach with its interior design and it’s genuinely refreshing to have dedicated buttons for key controls. The CX-80 is easy to use for this reason and well built, but buyers after a wow-factor might want more pizazz.

• 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. 

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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.

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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’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.

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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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