Do not listen to those who tell you to avoid the 2018 and newer Cx5’s.
They are giving you POOR AND MISLEADING ADVICE. Period.
In fact the CX5 reliability has been outstanding through all the Gen2 model years.
Just look around......do you see thread after thread about blown engines? Nope.
This anti CD discrimination needs to end once and for all. All this small vocal minority is doing is trashing on the best selling model Mazda makes and continues to produce with the 2.5L.
Once again, my family has 2 of these a 2018 and 2019, 70k combined mileage and 0 issues.
Yeah, I think it's a panic reaction to the 2018-2019 CD engine control module recall for a rocker arm falling off. Unless you happen to be one of the small handful of folks who unfortunately experienced the problem, or if one just failed to go in to have the recall update applied, I wouldn't worry about it.
Rather than listening to a handful of voices on an enthusiast web site looking for the negatives, consider instead that Consumer Reports gives the CX-5 it's highest reliability rating for each year 2017-2020. And the negatives reported by thousands of actual owners are concentrated in the electronics (4 out of 5 for reliability)--power rear hatches and sunroofs are specifically noted examples, maybe power exterior mirrors too which I could see given descriptions here of plastic gears breaking. I neither want nor need those options and frankly wouldn't take them for free on any vehicle.
While there is never a guarantee you won't get a vehicle produced on a bad day on the line, a robot going out of calibration, a bad batch of a particular part, even a manufacturing flaw in one particular part, etc,, the best one has to go on is that the vehicle is industry-leading for reliability in this class, including 5 out of 5 for the engines in the aggregate, based on a large number of driver experiences. Since the preponderance of sales are for the 2.5L, 5 out of 5 tilts toward those motors.
And it surely gets better at the lower trim levels--less stuff that can go bad.