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According to Masashi Otsuka, vice president, Mazda North American Operations, R&D;,
the all-new, second-gen, 2016 CX-9 is a vehicle that is North American-centric. Although
the vehicle is being built by Mazda in Hiroshima, approximately 80 percent of all of
the seven-passenger, three-row crossovers will be shipped to North America. He says,
"Normally at Mazda, most development work is done in Japan. But the planning, design and
development was done in North America from the start. The development was led by the
U.S. team."
Another difference is that while Mazda has been rolling out a number of stylish cars and
crossovers with the Kodo design language for the past several years, vehicles that have
pretty much been centered on competing in the center of the market, the CX-9 is meant
to be, according to Otsuka, the "flagship" for the brand, meaning that while there are the
Touring and Grand Touring trims, they've gone even higher with the Signature trim. This
is manifest in such things as the use, for the first time at Mazda, of Nappa leather on the
interior. And Julien Montousse, director for Design at Mazda North American Operations,
points to the use of real aluminum and actual wood from a tree, rosewood (sourced from
Japanese guitar maker Fujigen), not from a vat of polymer.
The CX-9 is designed and engineered with a level of care that is truly outsized given the
fact that Mazda is a company with a small percentage of the U.S. market, 1.8 percent in 2015,
according to Autodata ( motorintelligence.com ).
"We decided to ignore the
competitive specs and go for
what the car is going to do in
the real world. What is typically
advertised in the catalog, the
0 to 60 time and the peak
horsepower, is often at odds
with what you want to do to
make a car drive well in the real
world." Dave Coleman, vehicle
development engineer, Mazda
North American Operations
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AD&P; ∕ SEPTEMBER 2016
MAZDA CX-9