What's going on at Mazda? Poor showing from the Mazda 2 petrol and the MX5, both I find suprising. I suspect data glitch, unless anyone knows better.

Interestingly, a poor result for the Volvo V40. A friend has a 65 reg D4 diesel, a lovely car but in the 6 months she's owned it it has had a whole new emissions EGR system and 2 attempts to fix faulty clutch hydraulics. Not good.

I still think that many of these co-called surveys are not that accurate in terms of the expectations of the car owners themselves, the type of owner (private or company car) and how the data is analysed. Do they rank faults by seriousness, how long it takes (including number of times in the garage) to rectify them, how the owner drives and the type of driving/distances covered?

One problem (obviously not with the Mazda MX-5) that often drops up is where people buy/lease for work cars that un wholy unsuitable for the type of driving they do, such as diesels for predominately short trips and generally low annual mileages, or in the case of people buying dual clutch driven cars (funny how all the 'dieselgate follow-the-fix' issues and DSG woes don't seem to show up across all VAG cars in the 'survey' [I would've though they would in the 'top rated' A3, though many of those faults don't show up in year 1) or those with larger turbos, not driving them sympathetically as recommended by the manufacturer in the handbook. Obviously people can ignore such advice, but I still suspect some dealerships and even whole manufacturers are still actively lying to customers to shift diesel cars, especially at the moment when there's a glut of them following dieselgate.

Mazda has suffered from problems with its (bought-in) diesel engines, which yet to be proven to have been fixed, so if customers are (which I'm not implying they are) sold a bill of goods when buying one or choose to ignore advice, it may mean many who buy a diesel powered car end up with problems. What would be interesting as regards the MX-5 is to see where the FIAT 124 Spider came, given, other than the engine, a few other components and some of the bodywork, they are the same car, given the disparity in the scores posters here have alluded to as regards the Up/Mito/Citigo and Aygo/C1/108.

Also, I wonder if this 'survey' is only a snapshot at, say 1 year from new. If so, its hardly a representative lifetime of ownership of a car.