Mazda Announces G-Vectoring Control Plus

When it comes to both mechanical and automotive development, Mazda has taken numerous steps to advance existing technology instead of automatically adopting new, complex, and potentially problematic components in order to meet targets and deliver a driving experience. Where many companies have started to offer adaptive suspension as a standard option, Mazda still believes in the tenets of a well-designed chassis and suspension geometry.

G-Vectoring Control was one such item that used a mild ignition retard system to shift the weight of the car onto its front wheels during cornering. The purpose of this is to provide more feedback to the driver and make the car a little more agile, thus reducing steering effort. Many seasoned drivers already do this, consciously or subconsciously, through trimming the throttle or applying a little bit of braking for some forward weight transfer.

But with the new G-Vectoring Control Plus, which will first be rolled out with the updated CX-5 and eventually across the range, there’s the addition of a brake-based system that further improves handling stability – and it’s not torque vectoring, like you would expect. The brakes are applied to the outside front wheel when exiting a corner, which induces a certain amount of yaw that straightens the car a little quicker (a bit like an overzealous stability control system).

In more simple terms, it’s a system that reduces the effort needed to straighten the wheel as you come out of a maneuver. The system operates whether you’re unwinding the steering coming out of a bend or if you’re making sudden lane changes in slippery conditions, and you can bet that Mazda engineers spent a lot of time calibrating it to ensure it doesn’t behave in a particularly strange way.