New CX-5 Owner

My wife and I had been thinking about replacing her '04 Honda Pilot with a smaller SUV now that we no longer need the extra seating capacity. The Pilot has been an amazing vehicle, 145K trouble free miles with no work ever performed except for maintenance. It is by far, the most reliable vehicle I have ever owned. It was hard to justify getting a new car when the Pilot was still running so well. Last week our decision was made for us when a teenage driver ran a stop sign and totaled the Pilot (luckily no injuries).

We had 4 cars on our short list: Honda CRV, Toyota RAV4, Subaru Forester and the CX-5. We wanted all of the latest safety features which ruled out the RAV4. Based on my previous experience with Toyotas, the RAV4 is probably a great car for people who just want a transportation appliance. The CRV is a nice car, but my wife didn't like the styling and I wasn't too excited about the CVT transmission. The Forester has great safety features that are even available in lower trim levels, but again the styling is boring and the CVT takes the fun out of driving.

That left the CX-5 GT. We were only about 5 minutes into the test drive when we decided this was the clear winner.

Likes:
Handling and steering response is excellent for an SUV
Sharp styling, especially the GT with the 19" wheels
Very nice interior and infotainment system
Overall high quality feel

Suggested improvements:
Needs memory seats in the fully optioned GT model
A few more horsepower would be nice (I'm biased, my other 2 cars are a Corvette Z06 and a Cadillac CTS-V)

Overall we both love the CX-5. I can now understand why most of the car enthusiast magazines give it great reviews.

Congratulations, a great choice. Traded in a BMW 228 for my GT AWD CX-5 4 weeks ago and loving it more every day. ZERO problems so far.

Z06Trev said:

My wife and I had been thinking about replacing her '04 Honda Pilot with a smaller SUV now that we no longer need the extra seating capacity. The Pilot has been an amazing vehicle, 145K trouble free miles with no work ever performed except for maintenance. It is by far, the most reliable vehicle I have ever owned. It was hard to justify getting a new car when the Pilot was still running so well. Last week our decision was made for us when a teenage driver ran a stop sign and totaled the Pilot (luckily no injuries).

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Yeah no injuries is the most important thing coming out of a car accident! We have a '98 Honda CR-V with 17,2000 miles and it's also the most reliable vehicle we have ever owned. But Honda is not the Honda used to be! New Honda's have no new innovations and the quality is getting worse. The direction of car design is questionable such as the bad reviews on new HR-V and preference for the CVT. The slowness of switching to direct injection, refusal of replacing timing-belt with timing-chain on V6, and the use of questionable cylinder-deactivation system on V6, on and on all of that explain why Honda is going to wrong direction.

CX-5 is a great choice for a compact CUV. SkyActiv Technology is very efficient and logical. Things I experienced so far is the quality and reliability is not as good as our old Honda CR-V. And the lack of some nice features, such as memory seat, rear AC vents, tweeters on Bose system, more interior color selections are unfortunate. Burning some oil on our 2.5L is also a surprise to me. Fuel economy is very tricky and sensitive. It's difficult to reach advertised EPA fuel economy numbers, especially on the AWD.

Congrats and you've made an excellent choice!