If it has 1 former keeper that means 2 ownwers in total. Probably a fleet/company/lease car for 3 years when it clocked up 20k a year then went into private hands to a low mileage owners who moved it on after 3-4 years.

Fairly typical ownership pattern for that type of car.

Whilst petrols work quite well these days on small to medium cars and are hence quite popular once you get into the larger stuff (D/E Class up) then really over the last 10-15 years the petrols have made very little impact.

This is for a number of reasons but in that sector people generally buy to do a fair number of miles, many are fleet so BIK CO2 is very important, there seems to be a larger differences in real world fuel consumption and in many cases the petrol option has been pure and simply crap. Cars like an Insignia 1.8 which wheezes along with no guts and does 25mpg.

In many cases there was no sane reason to buy the petrol option but to be fair the Japanese have tended to make better offerings.

This is chaging somewhat now on the new market but if you're looking at 5-10 year old cars there won't be many of them.

It seems the one former keeper was a heavy traveller, then the next owner did 3K a year but only serviced it every 12K - which may be what the service schedule advises.

Service intervals are always distance and time. An example would be 12,000 miles or 12 months which ever comes first. A sensible person would never leave a car 6 years without a service.

If the car's warranty expired at 6 years is that why it is on the market?

Mazda warranty is 3 years 60,000 miles. ..

Some manufacturer's service schedules do omit the oil change if not enough mileage has been done. Porsche is one I can think of.

Modern fully synthetic oil really doesn't suffer much from sitting around a few years and changing every 3000 miles is excessive in most circumstances.

The rest of a "service" is basically a check over at many intervals from many manufacturers - a fair old chunk of which gets covered at MOT time anyway.

There is an assumption being made that its only the 3k a year owner who didnt have it serviced. Thats not how I read it. The last service prior to the current one was in 2012 (say at 48k), the first MoT was in 2014 at 72k. This means no service for 5.5 years and 37k (approx) If thats the true situation it suggests its best to buy elsewhere. However Jonny hasnt said what form the service history takes. Mazda doesnt issue service books for the Mazda 3 so I assume the 6 is the same. However the official history is available online to anyone with the registration number. In case the history he's seen is simply the receipts then its worth doing the online check to see if the system tells him more. Also, if not already done, it might be worth a check with the previous owner? My son bought an approved Mazda 3 last year with an apparent service gap that the selling dealer hadnt followed up. When the gap was pointed out (before the deal was signed) they contacted the previous owner and he had had the missng service done on time by a good local indie and receipts were produced. and the selling dealer confirmed in writing that it satisfied Mazda approved standards. A good result. Mazda approved covers quite old cars (up to 10 years old??) without much of a price premium so its worth checking the offical site if not already done.

Thank you - where would one check this record?

Most service books have a stamp and a few random looking ticks and are easily forged or lost. Far better to have the info online although it needs to be read-only accessible to avoid the nonfranchised issues the SLO mentions.

There is no reason why you cannot have both. Many manufacturers have central databases of when a car has been into a dealer and also have a service book for non-franchsied servicing.

Virtually no car unless written off early spends all its life in a franchised dealer network.

I have a petrol (165PS) estate on order. It's been on order for over four months, although it is finally on the boat from Japan and should be here for 1st March.

According to the salesman, Mazda didn't anticipate the diesel backlash and production (and the stock held at the European hub) was very much geared to diesel. I could have had a diesel estate in a fortnight from ordering!

My local dealership seems to be mostly stocked with diesels at present and are seemingly very keenly priced in comparison to the relatively few petrol-engined cars they are holding. Given Mazda have had many problems in the last decade (and, it seems still do, in my view [looking at reports here and elesewhere) with the reliability of their diesel-engined cars, you'd think that they would've 'got the hint' after dieselgate erupted and gradually wound back production of diesel-engined cars in favour of their very reliable petrol-engined ones, especially as they're seemingly making very decent progress with their new-fangled, very efficient HCCI petrol engines for the next gen of their cars.