A Week With the 2025 Mazda CX-70 PHEV Premium Plus

Mazda’s new CX-70 PHEV may move you to a new level of eloquence as you consider the new plug-in hybrid offering from the Japanese automaker.

William Shakespeare’s best-known star-crossed protagonist once emoted, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” What, you might ask, does that have to do with a Mazda hybrid crossover SUV?

Well, for all intents and purposes, the Mazda CX70 and CX-90 have but one difference. The CX-70 is offered with two rows of seating, while the CX-90 can only be had with three. So, even though they have different nomenclatures, they are two roses with different names.

New version of existing model

The Mazda CX-70 debuts for the 2025 model year, while the CX-90 bowed in 2024. This makes the CX-70 a new version of an existing model.

And the CX-70 benefits mightily from its kinship with the CX-90, garnering handsome styling, a premium interior treatment, admirable handling and a selection of energetic powertrains.

Premium interior experience

Finished in a hue Mazda’s marketing squad dubbed Melting Copper Metallic, the PHEV Premium Plus iteration of the CX-70 with which I spent a week featured supple black Nappa leather-trimmed seats with copper accents.

The Premium Plus package also added power adjustments for the front passenger’s seat, ventilation for both front seats as well as heat for the second-row seats. The steering wheel was also heated and wrapped in leather.

Here again, Mazda proves its interior treatments punch above their weight class with handsome architecture and fine material choices. Overall comfort was commendable too. The seats were supportive, and legroom was good at every seating position.

Ingress and egress were easy. Outward visibility was good all around. The controls were placed intuitively and required no thumbing of the owner’s manual to figure out. I have always preferred the dial and pointer approach to an infotainment interface, which the Mazda offered.

Cargo considerations

One might be tempted to ask why Mazda feels the need to offer two separate models if the only difference is the CX-70 lacks a third row of seats. After all, they do fold flat in the CX-90, so you can have the extra seats when you need them and put them away when you don’t.

Granted, eliminating the third row does reduce the CX-70’s weight in comparison to the CX-90, but only by about 50 pounds. This is a negligible amount, given the class of vehicle. Performance isn’t significantly improved, nor is fuel economy. However, eliminating the CX-90’s third row does give the CX-70 a hidden storage compartment behind the second row.

Yin and yang

Powering “my” CX-70 was a 323-horsepower plug-in hybrid system, capable of producing 369 pound-feet of torque. To accomplish this Mazda’s engineering team paired a 189-hp direct injected 2.5-liter inline 4-cylinder engine with a 173-hp electric motor positioned between the engine and the 8-speed automatic transmission.

Sustenance for the electric motor is drawn from a 14.8 kWh battery pack. According to the EPA, the CX-70 will travel up to 25 miles without calling for backup from the gasoline engine.

The agency also estimates the CX-70 will return 25 miles in combined city/highway driving for every gallon of regular unleaded you pump into its fuel tank. That figure proved a bit optimistic over the course of my week with the CX-70, as I averaged 22.5 mpg according to the Mazda’s trip computer.

Driving impressions

For years now, Mazda’s unique selling proposition has been the engaging diving experience one enjoys from its vehicles. To that end, the MX-5 Miata serves as the marque’s halo product, embodying this philosophy in its purest form. And, while the CX-70 is by no means as agile as the Mazda’s two-seat roadster, they do share that characteristic.

In fact, the two post almost identical zero-to-60 times, with each being capable of achieving that benchmark in slightly less than six seconds. The CX-70 also exhibits far more agility than its closest competitors.

That said, its weight does make itself apparent when hustling along twisty two-lanes. Further, Mazda’s powertrain team has quite a bit of room from which to extract additional refinement. I caught the transmission napping on more than few occasions when a prescient downshift would have been appreciated.

Further, the brakes were a bit overly eager to engage. While I will be among the first to say this is far better than the opposite, it does taint the driving experience a bit. Throttle response was bit touchy as well. Taken together, these traits made driving the CX-70 smoothly require more conscious effort than is typical in a driver-oriented vehicle.

Lyndon says

Now, before you go away thinking Lyndon said the CX-70 is a handful to drive, nothing could be farther from the truth. The 2025 Mazda CX-70 PHEV Premium Plus is an enjoyable offering with handsome styling, a beautiful interior treatment and engaging road manners.

The plug-in hybrid Mazda also offers more cargo space than many other two-row crossovers in this class. And indeed, the points I made about driving the plug-in Mazda apply equally to other hybrids on the market.

I just wish the CX-70 PHEV behaved more like the strictly gasoline-powered iterations of the model. Pricing starts at $57,450. The price as tested for the CX-70 PHEV Premium Plus example I drove is $59,275.