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New Mazda5 debuts with Nagare design language

Mazda to launch a new Mazda5 at the 2010 Geneva auto show.

Wayne Cunningham Managing Editor / Roadshow
Wayne Cunningham reviews cars and writes about automotive technology for CNET's Roadshow. Prior to the automotive beat, he covered spyware, Web building technologies, and computer hardware. He began covering technology and the Web in 1994 as an editor of The Net magazine.
Wayne Cunningham

2011 Mazda5
The new Mazda5 realizes Mazda's Nagare design language. Mazda

2011 Mazda5 to debut in Geneva (photos)

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For the last five years, Mazda showed concept cars on the auto show circuit featuring what it calls Nagare styling, and we finally get to see a production car that embodies this new design. Nagare is a Japanese word meaning flow, denoting how wind and water flow around objects in nature.

The new Mazda5, which Mazda says is its first car to fully realize this design language, exhibits an almost bulbous front end, with lines that contour the sides of the car. The Mazda3 showed a similar front end, but didn't follow through on the rest of the car.

Mazda debuts the new model at the 2010 Geneva auto show, with European specs that include a direct injection 2-liter four-cylinder engine out of the company's new Sky-G line of power plants. Mazda touts the Sky-G engine as 15 percent more efficient than its predecessor. In Europe, the Mazda5 can also be had as a diesel.

We expect the U.S. version of the Mazda5 to use the same 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine as the Mazda3.

Check out the 2011 Mazda5.