Long-term report: Dreaming of cold weather with the Mazda MX-30

Strange as this sounds, I’ve been looking forward to the arrival of winter. Proper winter, I mean – frost and snow and sub-zero temperatures and all that. The reason? Probably my favourite feature on the MX-30: pre-heating it from my phone.

Okay, I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s quickly become one of those little luxuries I both never knew I needed, and equally never want to do without ever again.

Hence my desire for a bit of proper winter: it’s all well and good setting the cabin to a (very specific) 21.5 degrees before I toddle off to Sainsbury’s, but now I want to start showing off. I want the neighbours to be out at seven in the morning, tirelessly scraping away at their windscreens as I nonchalantly hop into my toasty and readily-defrosted Mazda.

Sadly that hasn’t quite happened yet – at least not in my little pocket of the Midlands – but with just over a month until the MX-30 is taken away from me, I live in hope. In fact, it almost feels like our particular car was made with winter in mind: GT Sport Tech trim gets heated front seats and steering wheel, the former of which get almost ferociously hot.

I say ‘almost’, because one particular part of the MX-30 doesn’t enjoy winter quite as much as me. Yes, it’s that dreaded R word again: range. This isn’t anything unique to the Mazda of course: all electric cars, from Teslas to Hyundais, get much less efficient when temperatures hit single digits and below.

However, while knocking 20% off the range of your Tesla Model 3’s 220-mile range might not affect your plans too drastically, cars with smaller batteries like the MX-30 feel the effect more acutely. For me, this manifested itself in my regular-ish 140-mile trip to the South Coast suddenly needing two charging stops, not one.

On paper, this isn’t a big deal, but driving an EV in the UK can feel a bit like that Ben Franklin quote: Fail to prepare, and you prepare to fail. You can’t just set off and assume there’ll be a charger exactly where you need it, nor that it’ll actually work when you get there.

So when you realise you’re not going to make it to that lovely, reliable bank of Instavolt rapid chargers you’ve been using as a regular stopping point for the last six months, things get a bit hairy.

When I took on the MX-30, I promised myself I wasn’t going to drone on and on about the size of its battery – because after all, it’s just one small part of the picture. But equally it shouldn’t be ignored, because even the most town-centric driver will occasionally need to drive more than 100 miles at a time – and it’s on those days, stuck in the rain at a broken rapid charger, they might wish they’d bought an MG ZS for the same money.

It’s a bit of a shame because the MX-30 is actually a really good long-distance cruiser: cushy ride quality, excellent Bose stereo, and brilliant at sealing out intrusive noises from the outside world. It’s much more sure-footed than many other EVs I could mention too – like it was engineered to feel secure far beyond its 90mph top speed. Which, of course, it sort of was: one handy benefit of adapting a ‘regular’ car platform is that it feels much more like a normal car.

I do have some other moans to get out of the way, I’m afraid – and the first is to do with my beloved remote heating function. Quite a few EVs and plug-in hybrids can do this, and most are able to power this directly from the wallbox you’ve plugged the car into – thus giving you a nice, toasty car with a 100% fully charged battery when you set off.

Sadly not so in the MX-30, which insists on using its own battery power instead – meaning on a particularly cold morning, your freshly-defrosted car has eaten 10 miles of range before you’ve gone anywhere.

The app itself, and connected car functions in general, can feel a bit basic too. It’s all very nicely designed and has proved pretty reliable, but don’t expect Tesla-levels of functionality.

You can force it to manually start charging, for example, but can’t tell it to stop, or set any kind of schedule – this has to be performed by sitting in the car and fiddling with the car’s infotainment system. Similarly, it’ll let you lock the car, but not unlock it, and there’s no handy way of sounding the horn or flashing the lights if you’ve lost it in a car park.

Still, these are minor things: on the whole, I reckon the Mazda does plenty of things better than its closest rivals – it’s a much nicer place in which to sit, for starters, and has much better manners when it comes to handling. And for me, that would be enough to drag me towards the Mazda dealer.