Comparing the Mazda CX-50 to the Kia Sportage for the first time.
You’re watching new car spin this is the mazda cx-50 all-wheel drive skyactiv g turbo we do have a video on my channel with yale doing a trip to uh california to drive this when it had their press launch and here we are on a ranch driving it off-road clearly i’m somewhere and uh well i got one wheel off the ground you can see it has a tow hitch it’s all-wheel drive
It’s bigger than the cx-5 it’s a little wider for the specifics go watch the other video where yale sat through a whole presentation basically the timeshare and drank the kool-aid today i’m actually going to compare this vehicle to the kia sportage and you’d be like why why would i do that well it’s not because of the price point or the size it’s just because
They’re both here at this ranch and i’m off-roading both of them and uh well amongst other ones but i just feel like the way this thing drives is a little different it’s much more uh peppy it’s sportier than the sportage but it feels different than the sportage off-road and what i mean by that is uh well i’ll have to cut to the sportage and show you but here i
Mean you can just hear the you can hear the grass just you know making its way along the underside so whether or not that’s uh the protection pans or not what we call them skid plates uh i don’t know if this has skid plates or not we should probably look under it real quick let’s do that and then we’ll cut to the kia what do we have we have a lot of plastic
Everywhere on this thing yeah a lot of plastic and part of a part of that’s for fuel economy and everything else am i cursing piano or some kind of some kind of radio guy all right so yeah the mazda is you know it’s nice it’s peppy it’s it’s a good car for uh people who want a small um off-roader but not wanting a jeep i guess what is the purpose of this
Thing who knows maybe it’s because they have on the lot and it’s in your price range but what i want to do is just give you an experience of what this sounds like and then we’ll cut to the kia and you know the on-road manners are different between the two but so are the off-road manners and i know no one really off-roads these things but i think you can really
Discover a lot of a machine when you push it to its limits and that’s what automotive journalists do i myself don’t bother you with the specs because you know you can go look that up and read that for yourself what i’m trying to do is journal the experience sort of like if you look at my other channel diesel drives i took diesel vehicles on long road trips to
Discover what they’re like and uh you know journaling it along the way so of course now diesel vehicles are dead but what you have is a catalog of what it was like back in the day to be able to go 700 miles for instance on a tank of fuel and uh yeah that’s what i did i journaled that aspect so there’s the kia right there we’re gonna hop in that next and what i
Want to do is just give you the experience back to back i’m not even going to do a cut no cuts i just want to go back to back park next to this pathfinder whoa easy on the zoom there brian what’s up turn it off boom all right let’s zoom out okay just for comparison all right mazda window sticker blah blah blah 43 000 170. okay get my hat here because i don’t
Need it but i’m going to use it okay that versus four by e rock creek pathfinder trd pro tundra kia sportage oh power seats i like the sportage more to be honest so the mazda had really nice vented seats we have vented seats here as well we got our uh temperature adjustment there volume adjustment where is the volume adjustment i’m going to put on mute anyway
Okay you could tell we had some radio hosts in this car because it’s on sirius fox news unfortunately all right so this panel is really cool because it’s actually a touch screen panel but it also looks like a just a display very nice i’m going to turn the fan down just a little bit there we go actually you know what we’ll put it on auto and then auto one there we
Go put it in reverse here we actually have drive modes and a locking center diff so it’s a little bit more robust i think than the cx 50. we’re gonna go take this on the trail and as far as the comparison and the cabin comfort this feels bigger than the mazda cx-50 i think it is bigger inside maybe um obviously four and aft not necessarily width wise i think
Width-wise the loss is a little bit bigger but you never know there’s mike herzing again all right so this feels a lot smoother off-road i don’t feel any of these rocks i don’t feel any uh displacement in the in the right quality it’s it’s butter it’s almost like i’m on i’m a hoverboarding here let’s go right over this part this is the rougher park and it feels
Lifted just like the cx50 feels just a little higher than normal not a car not a truck see if i can just turn the fan down a little bit and we’ll see if we have any grass making weird noises a little bit but not as bad as the mazda was yeah so there you go back to back definitely i prefer the kia sportage which is weird but not really because back in 1998
Maybe 97 96 uh actually my mom bought a kia sportage for some reason and uh the kia sportage funny enough my neighbor owned a kia dealer so that’s probably why um the sportage had a mazda miata engine in it so if you were all a mazda fan and you like a cv get the old school kia sportage they even came in a manual my mom bought a manual ikea sportage and it had
The mazda engine it was kind of kind of slow but the mazda engine uh made it very very unique and kia sportage is always had just a little pardon me a little bit for being just a really cool little car despite the the way the current buyers uh drive them and whatever you know i’m just saying for for me i like the kia sportage and uh oh there’s jesus jesus garcia
Oh yeah this is definitely very compliant i like it i like it a lot i’m gonna make a left here all right all right some some off-road noise here but nowhere near as gnarly as the mazda and that’s kind of where i’m going to end it i will end it properly though by stopping right over here where there’s hardly any high grass and i will pull out the window sticker
It says not final oh well this is why i like the kia sportage more okay wait what no that’s the mercedes c300 okay this is not a mercedes but uh well there you go uh kia let’s see maybe i can find the window sticker in here nope nope as they say no sticker price so it must be free all right well go look it up for yourself and you tell me what the price was
Because i have no clue welcome to the world of automotive journalism uh it’s not the manufacturer’s fault there’s actually a company that supplies uh the vehicles to the journalists so that the manufacturers can do other things with their time oh here we go let’s check out the articulation and this is where i started the mazda video so this is we’re going to end
The kia oh look at these tires too these are much more off-road worthy tires all-terrain ta bf goodrich yep oh yeah that’s definitely off the ground okay well there you go kia sportage x pro in my mind far superior to the cx50 if you are going to off-road so if you live in a place like colorado for instance a place where it snows this might be worth it and you
Do have skid plates let’s see we checked on the mazda but do we have them here either way i’d drive this first before i drive the uh drive the mazda cx-50 and that looks like leaves of three let them be that’s got to be poison oak so these shoes are trash great just great all right kia sportage drive it before the cx-50 let me know what you think oh look i
Also have a heated windshield uh hard to tell there we go those lines are heating elements so definitely set up for colorado where you can get in and turn on the heated windshield and it’ll defrost faster than using the heater to frost uh front to frost option very nice okay lunch time i gotta go meet up with the homies of the texas motor press association go
Get lunch and uh we’ll continue with more vehicles off-road thanks
Transcribed from video
Offroad Impressions: Mazda CX-50 vs Kia Sportage By New Car Spin