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>> Well I've gotta give Mazda credit in this CX9, they're trying, I'm just not buying. Let's check the tech.
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>> Now we're driving a 2008 CX-9 Touring, which is their mid-trim level; there's sport touring, grand touring, so we're in the middle. This head unit navigation is optional. Wow! Look at that nav screen. That's awful! I haven't seen resolution on a screen that bad since I had my Commodore 64. Same thing goes for the menus. What's wrong with the fonts? Are they growing a beard? Yeah, sure I can see what I'm doing, but if this is your premium crossover give me some premium feel from the tech. Ergonomically there is some good and some bad things going on here. They've got a display control, which is kind of cute. Let's use Select, I think it's three different angles on the LCD. So you can kill glare no matter what. Ironically I find that in the standard flat position it's really good on glare. So they probably didn't need to include that feature, but it's a crowd pleaser and the kids will play with it until it breaks; so that's kind of fun. We have a 6 disk CD changer, you can see you get to a load menu here, you select a slot, and you're still wondering where the hell's the slot. And then when you hit Load, ah ha! It reveals, it's right there behind the display. And here's some more weirdness on the audio on this thing. You can get the Bose audio system two ways. One is in combination with this rear seat entertainment system, then you have the 11 speakers, 296 watts, audio pilot and center point technology. Or you can just get the Bose audio system front unit, and that's 260 some odd watts, 10 speakers, so you loose one speaker. So it's a little confusing. And they do some bundling there where you can't just get the RSC plain and simple by itself. Okay, here's a real nutty option that I wish we had on this one. It's the dockable Nintendo Game Boy option. So there's a dock for a Game Boy Advance, wireless headphones, a wireless game controller, a 10.2-inch LCD to do the gaming on, and a DVD player. The backseat rig is a 9-inch drop down LCD here in the roof, in the ceiling. That's pretty common. I don't like it there, because it often occludes the view out of the rearview. In this case though I've gotta say, this car's got a pretty high ceiling and I'm not having a problem with it dropping down in my vision. Power for the CX9 is the same across the board, 3.7 liter, dual overhead cam gas V6, 273 horsepower, 270 foot pounds of torque. And it's also a one choice only transmission; 6 speed automatic with a shiftable gate here on the left, no paddles or nonsense like that. Oh, check it out! Bargain of the week from your Mazda dealer. They have a blind spot monitor system that only costs $200 bucks. It'll give you an amber indicator on either of the mirrors that show these little cars side by side when someone is in one of your blind spots. I do find it's very limited though. If a car isn't exactly in one place, I don't see to get an indicator. So it's a little bit specific. And I've got a hunch that $200 is on top of another package. Okay, let's price our technically ambitious, but sometimes uneven CX-9. $35,000's the base on this car. That's for a touring all wheel drive. Now the big options, $2,500 for the Bose audio system with the rear seat entertainment. $1,700 if you just want Bose and no rear seat. $2,500 more for navigation. Another $200 for blind spot monitoring, but that's gotta be in conjunction with some other package. And the crazy one, the Game Boy dock technology, $1,400 more.
