I bought a 2015 CX-5 Touring FWD a few weeks ago for my wife and it has a very noisy engine at idle. It sounds like a baseball card in a bicycle's spokes and it quiets down a bit when the RPM's go up. It's almost like valve train noise. I can hear this thing chatter from 30ft away and it makes me uncomfortable.

Is it normal for a brand new car to sound like this? I should have said something after the first few days driving it, but I'm so used to driving cars with 150k+ miles on them that it didn't seem that big of a deal to me at the time, but now that the new car fever is wearing off it's starting to bug me.

 

Normal sound for direct-injected engines.

 

Assume you're talking about noise at cold start up. Look in your owners' manual for cold engine start up noise. This is perfectly normal for SkyActiv engines.

 

It's not just cold startup unfortunately, it's all the time.

I didn't know direct injection engines were this loud since most of the ones i've been around were fairly quiet and this one sounds like a diesel.

 

Mine is loud at start up and then when warm and the AC off is extremely quiet. With the AC on it's a little louder and rougher. I have the 2.5L by the way too.

 

Skyactive Direct Injection engines have a lot of compression (12-13:1?), and as the name implied, squirts fuel directly into the compression chamber instead of ahead of the intake valves like the more common/older port injection does. There is something on the order of 1500, 1600 lbs of fuel pressure in the system to accomplish that, and the injectors work very hard to overcome all that pressure.
That's probably the noise(s) you are hearing that don't sound "normal."