Grand Touring 4dr Wagon
2007 Mazda Mazda5

The Tutors have been waiting months to get a Mazda5 in the Autoblog Garage. The car-like minivan has been on the our family shopping list since we knew we were adding an extra person to the house. Based on the Mazda3 platform, the 5 promised a sedan ride with family-size space for parents on a budget. That, in my mind, is the perfect vehicle. Our strato blue tester was a Touring model with 17" wheels, cloth seats, automatic climate control, and moonroof. The only optional equipment was satellite radio. The sticker on the window listed a base price of $19,780 with a $430 charge for the Sirius receiver and a delivery charge of $595, for a grand total of $20,375. Continue reading about the Mazda5 Touring after the jump. %Gallery-11900% All photos Copyright ©2007 Chris Tutor / Weblogs, Inc. If you travel with a human younger than 21, you carry loads of toys. And those myriad toys gotta be stowed somewhere, or else you get action figures lurking beneath the accelerator and baby dolls flailing away loudly on hollow plastic in back. Mazda's designers have no kids. None. I am convinced of this because the Mazda5 has the small-item storage of a Kawasaki . OK, sure, there is a small cubby hole in the very back, and a little mesh baggy thing suspended between the two center seats, and a shallow indentation beneath each of those same seats' cushions. But you try explaining to a bored toddler while doing 70 down the interstate, why he can't have his coloring book because he and his child seat are sitting on it. Oh, and the driver and passenger share what seemed to be a vertical bread box between the front seats. It must have been a foot deep and about six inches wide, perfectly suited for umbrellas. Or maybe rolled up newspapers. The tiny glove box was completely taken up by the car's manual. What few storage bins the car did have were unlined hard plastic which meant the loose change up front rattled over every bump, the small items in back knocked about with every turn and the umbrella by my elbow bounced around wildly. Come on Mazda. How much could rubber liners have cost? And that's about as passionately positive or negative I can get about the Mazda5. Otherwise, it's not a bad vehicle. It just seemed every time my wife and I found a feature we liked about the Mazda, we found a negative to balance it out. Take the interior, for example. Behind the two front seats, there was ample seating for five, and with those seats folded, enough cargo room to move a college senior from dorm to apartment. The balancing negative came with driver and passenger seats. Despite being an average 5'10", I felt cramped behind the wheel. Push the seat close enough to properly work the clutch, and my knees were scraping the plastic beneath the instrument cluster. The passenger seat wasn't much better. With …
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