Mazda is yet to comment on recent reports which claim the company will stop producing its three minivans/MPVs. Looking at the future product pipeline, it does seem as though people carriers will be left to rival OEMs, and yet more crossovers and SUVs from Mazda will be the effective replacements at plants in Japan and China.
CX-3, CX-5, CX-9. Name the missing alphanumeric in this sequence. Only that it’s not missing. How so? Well, the CX-7 does still exist but only in China. It was built in Japan between 2006 and 2012 but then two years later a curious thing happened: the FAW Mazda joint venture started making this SUV at a plant in Changchun. Build commenced in July 2014 and will likely keep going until the second half of 2017.
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Outside China, the gap in the Mazda crossover and SUV model range is obvious but the company hasn’t been in a hurry to fill it. The reason was a combination of factors. Firstly, trends need to be observed and Mazda wanted to be sure that the market for similarly sized minivans really was in steep decline. The Biante, a now eight year old model, has the majority of its sales in Japan, as does its larger brother, the MPV (Mazda8 in China and some other countries). The smaller Premacy/Mazda5 is less aged but it’s coming up for six years of production, which is long by its maker’s usual cycles.
Mazda might be profitable but it doesn’t have deep pockets. Why spend big on new models, each of which would be entering a declining segment? Investing in people carriers would also mean fewer resources for models with potentially higher margins: enter the follow-up to the CX-7, which will be a coupe-style crossover to be manufactured both in the home market, and by FAW Mazda.
The main reason why the first generation CX-7 was not replaced is that size wise it was too close to the original CX-9. Now, the second generation of the big seven-seat SUV is here and it’s 1.2″ shorter than the old model, so there is even less of a gap between the CX-5 and CX-9. Forget conventional vehicle classes for a moment, and things fall into place though.
The future CX-7 was likely previewed by the Koeru, a concept revealed at September 2015’s Frankfurt IAA. The prototype was based upon the CX-5 but 60mm longer and wider. Think of it as a kind of ‘CX-5 Coupe’. Yes, it could be called CX-4 or CX-6 but CX-7 surely makes the most sense.
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By GlobalDataWhatever the model name, this additional crossover will be manufactured in the northeast of China by the FAW Mazda joint venture, taking the place of an outdated Mazda6 sedan, sales of which have been plunging. Changchun might not be the car’s only global manufacturing plant, though, with build also expected to take place at one of the two Ujina plants in Japan. Whether or not it will be exported to North America is yet to be confirmed but it does seem likely. And how long will it be before the Salamanca factory in Mexico is also making low cost/high margin SUVs? Surely by the end of this decade at the latest.
