Leaders of the space race

THERE ARE PLENTY of things in this life on which you can’t put a price, but space is not one of them. Virgin Galactic reckons it can help you join the 62-mile-high club for $250K, while back here on earth, we’re calling it 20 grand, give or take, for the regular kind of space. That’s the rough difference between what Mazda charges for its top-spec all-wheel-drive five-seater CX-5 and its bigger brother you see here, the seven-seater CX-9 Azumi flagship. Okay, they’re not directly comparable because of equipment and tech differences, but engines and transmissions are shared, so it’s not an absurd observation: those two small seats in the third row amount to around $10,000 each. But to plenty of Aussie families, they’re so invaluable they actually are hard to put a price on.

We reckon the current mainstream leaders of the seven-seater SUV segment are this pair – the Mazda we anointed as our 2017 COTY and the newly minted fourth-gen Kia Sorento. But first we need to address the model choices we’ve gone for here. The Mazda CX-9 line-up offers just one engine choice, the 2.5-litre SkyActiv G delivering 170kW and 420Nm, so that was easy. Kia’s Sorento is (at least until hybrids arrive in 2021) available with both petrol (a 3.5-litre atmo V6 making 200kW and 332Nm) or our choice here, the 2.2-litre four-pot turbo-diesel making 148kW and 440Nm. We wanted the flagship all-wheel-drive variants of both models, and the Sorento is engineered to drive only the front wheels when the petrol V6 is chosen. Which is