Useful(?) tidbits from my personal experience

Here is some information on the Mazda MX5 that I would have found useful before I bought mine.

Economy
Mazda quote about 33-35 mpg for the sort of motoring I do, but I have a heavy right foot, so I get 32 mpg on average in my 1.8i. My commute consists of about 20 minutes, half of which is in 30mph town areas, and half in 80, er, I mean 60mph open road.

In October 2000 England had a fuel crisis (protestors blockaded the petrol distribution network for a couple of weeks, and due to this and the subsequent panic buying, petrol stations dried up entirely). So I drove as economically as I could for 2 weeks (ensured I had good tyre pressures, tried to stick to about 50mph in 5th gear, minimised braking for minor inconveniences in the road like roundabouts, turned off the engine while in long traffic-light sequences, and avoided accelerating hard, passing, etc. I must add that it was at times physically painful to restrain my foot so high above the floor!). This had the net effect of raising the fuel economy from 32mpg to 33mpg. Needless to say, my right foot has become exceedingly heavy once more, as the car is so economical in high-burn mode that it's just not worth the effort of trying to be more economical!

I think I probably drive reasonably economically anyway - I like to accelerate hard, but I tend to take my foot off the pedal early and engine-brake into intersections rather than using my brakes, and my drive is often hampered by other cars on the road, so that tends to keep me to more economical speeds. But the engine in my MkII seems to be reasonably efficient as well - there doesn't seem to be a great deal of difference between motoring at 50mph and 80mph in terms of mpg.

Soft top
The soft-top, while featuring highly in my list of reasons to buy the car, was also my main area of concern. I'd been in a lot of soft-tops, and they had the common features of being leaky, windy, noisy, and often a pain to fold up and down. After 18 months I've had no problems whatsoever with the hood & seals.

The MX5's hood takes a couple of seconds to raise or lower. By which I mean 2 seconds. Well, OK. 5. If your left arm is reasonably strong then you can actually raise/lower the hood while sitting in the (parked!) car, but if not, it still takes less than 10 seconds to hop in and out of the car to operate the hood. It is locked in place by 2 clips, one at each side of the windscreen, so you just pop the clips and flip the hood back. This is much faster than any electrically-operated system I've seen, and I think the gain in boot space over an electrically driven hood is well worth it. That and being able to look smug when it suddenly buckets down with rain and the guy in the Mercedes in front of you gets drenched while waiting for the graceful ballet of his hood (intermission and all).

I normally wind the windows down a couple of inches (or open the doors) before raising/lowering the hood - this just makes things a bit easier when the hood is near-closed.

Road noise with the hood up is (I felt) surprisingly low. No worse than my 1987 Celica - but obviously a bit noisier than one of those brand new hard-top cars with squishy suspension, luxury supersoft seats, and a mini-bar. If you're bothered by this, padded liners can be bought that help reduce the noise even more. But let's face it, if you're considering a soft-top, noise can't be your prime concern!

The rear windscreen is proper glass, and heated, and the rearward view is generally very good. It is a little bit restrictive of view in the rear quarters when reversing, but you don't need to lean forwards or backwards far to see around the blind spot. It thaws ice from the outside and evaporates condensation from the inside very quickly (and it's easy to wipe with a cloth over your shoulder, unlike a 4-seater car!)

With the hood down, noise obviously increases! Up to about 40mph, with the windows wound down, wind buffeting is minimal. Above about 40mph, you can either go for the wind in your hair feeling, or wind the windows up, in which case it's surprisingly comfortable and wind-free in the cabin (still comfortable even at 100mph!). With the windows up, it's quiet enough that you don't have to shout to talk to the passenger (well, up to about 80mph!), and the stereo is surprisingly clear above the external noises.

The windows make a big difference to buffeting - with them up, only the top of my head gets much wind. With them down in summer, you get a nice breeze around your head. But the best configuration is to have the driver's window down and the passenger window up, which reduces the airflow around your head the most. This doesn't make much difference in summer, but on the chiller days, I find it makes a massive difference to how cold my ears get!

On a cold day, turning the heater on fills the cabin to about shoulder height, so a high collar and a hat (and in colder weather long sleeves) is all you need to remain comfortably warm. Although I reccommend trousers and a shirt as well in order to avoid spending the night in Jail :-) I am usually quite comfortable at 60mph in temperatures down to about 5 degrees C - below that, wind chill sets in and you have to slow down to stay comfortable. But this typically means I leave the hood up only when the material is icy and stiff and folding it would damage the hood - or when it's raining!

If it rains, then it's best to stop and flick the hood back up, but even in fairly heavy rain, you can stay completely dry if you keep between 45mph (where the rain goes over the top of the car) and 75mph (where the wind starts to suck it back in to hit the inside of the windscreen!) Extensive Government testing indicates, though, that in these conditions you almost always get stuck behind a car doing 30mph!

I initially promised to buy myself a hard top if the soft top was unsatisfactory during the winter. Now I don't think that it's worth the money for the small advantage - a gain in rear visibility, perhaps a bit quieter, possibly slightly less of a target for a yob with a knife - that it would afford. Second hand hard-tops seem to sell for less than half the new value, so if I were thinking of getting one, I doubt I'd buy it new. Also, I have found that I am happy to get the top down in extremely low temperatures, so even in mid winter there is only about 1 month where I have the top up "permanently".

Air conditioning
I used to have Air-con in my Celica. Haven't actually missed it yet, but obviously (a) this is England, so it's not often that hot, and (b) I haven't yet been caught in bad traffic in the heat. So long as the car is moving there's no problem. When you've left the car parked in the sun all day, it also cools down much faster than a hard-top once the top is down.

Handbrake
Make sure your passenger is friendly, and not liable to get overly violent when you start groping around their thigh for the brake.

Heater
This wouldn't matter much back home in NZ, but it's a more important feature in an English winter. Luckily, the heater is very effective. Compared to a saloon car, the cabin is perhaps 1/3rd the volume, so it heats and de-mists very rapidly - I was surprised to discover that my MX5 was more comfortable in winter temperatures than my old Celica. The heater revs up in about 2-3 minutes from a cold start, so you're not cold for long.

Boot
Not bad sizewise. I can fit an above-average week's shopping for 2 people, or 2 compact golf-bags fit snugly in there, although a friend's slightly bulkier bag won't fit in without removing the driver first (by which I mean 1-wood as opposed to my good self). In 15 months I've not really had any circumstances where the boot was inadequate for my needs (except in cases where I needed to transport more than 1 passenger anyway!)

The boot can be opened with the key (in a recessed lock which I find mildly annoying as you have to take care not to scratch the rear bumper with the rest of your keys) or with a remote catch in the compartment between the seats.

Seats
Very comfortable. Hold you reasonably well in the corners, but not quite as well as a nice Recaro! A good range of adjustability, although I have found that with my long arms and legs I've had to compromise on seating position slightly, as to avoid jamming my legs in, my arms have to reach out a little bit more than I would prefer - but not uncomfortably bad. After a 3-4 hour drive, I get out of the car in as good a shape as I ever have from that length driving a 'more comfortable' car.

Tyres
I've got a set of Yokohama A509's (195x50 on 15" alloys). After 14000 miles the wear seems good, and they are nice and grippy in the dry. Grip drops off quite a bit in wet/icy conditions, and I've had several close shaves where the car in front has easily outbraked me in the wet, which is (a) embarassing for a sports car (especially one with a reputation for awesome braking), and (b) highly worrying, so I intend to upgrade to a set of Bridgestone SO3 Pole Positions or perhaps some Toyo T1S Proxes soon. £70 a corner is not cheap, but it's a lot cheaper than removing a power pole from the bonnet!

If you get a flat, there's a teeny space-saver tyre in the boot, but I can't tell you much about it as I've not needed it so far (touch wood!). It has been suggested that it is better to ditch the space-saver tyre and replace it with a can of puncture repair foam (tyre weld), as this provides a bit more boot space and eliminates some unnecessary weight.

Ride & Handling
Obviously a sporty suspension means you feel all the bumps a lot more than in a squidgy car. But not uncomfortably so - although I tend to avoid the worst bumps in the road if I can (with the added bonus of adding pseudo-corners even when you're driving down a straight :-) Changing onto a smooth road surface does give you a much greater appreciation of how smoothly the car can glide along in the right conditions though! But who cares? It corners like it's on rails, which is the whole point.

Alarm
I've got a Mazda alarm, with central-locking. This has detectors for the bonnet, doors, and boot, plus a microwave sensor in the cabin. It has never been triggered by the hood flapping about, even in bad storms, which impressed me. It's also a nice quiet alarm - by which I mean when you arm it, the door locks go "clunk" and the lights flash, but there is no awful screeching noise.

This is the only area where I've had problems - the door locking mechanism fitted was a duff design which tended to get water into it. Several times I have been locked out of the car with frozen locks on a winter morning. In August 2000 I asked the dealer to see if they could improve things, which they failed to do, and managed instead to drop something heavy on the door sill and chip the paint!

Finally, in March 2001 I had to have the mechanisms replaced (under warranty) when the passenger door failed entirely. But the replacement lock is a new design which seems to have remedied the problems.

Mudguards
I've fitted a pair of front mudguards, as the amount of mud thrown along the side of the car in winter was a bit excessive (possibly aggravated by my wider tyres). These have made a massive difference to how much crud is thrown up the side of the car. I still can't see much use for read mudflaps though.

Reliability and Maintenance
Maintenance? What's that? Aside from refilling the windscreen washer and cleaning the car, nothing has been necessary. In terms of problems, I've had:

	A slight rattle in the passenger seat (fixed in a jiffy with judicious application of a bit of grease),
	My locks freezing a few times in winter (as described above). Fixed under the warranty.
	A baffle coming loose in my silencer after 12000 miles. Replaced free under the warranty.

So there have been a couple of minor things - it hasn't cost me anything to have them fixed, and I have a shiny new silencer and locks; so I think an extra year of free wear is worth the small hassle involved.

Well, OK. I've had one recurring problem that even the dealer couldn't sort out. My pre-MX5 mileage was about 5,000 miles a year. Now it's 10,000. The difference seems related to the comment "hey, it's a nice day" (in England. Yeah. I was surprised, too) which is frequently followed by a 2 hour drive that fetches up back at home wondering where it was that I meant to go when I left, and how am I going to clean all those bugs off the windscreen.

Just the other day I thought my car was dirty so I washed it. Then I ran it around the block to dry it off, which took 3 hours and 145 miles, after which the car was dirtier than when I started! I'm afraid I have no solution to this conundrum, although I suspect that changing cars back to a Lada Samara might just do the trick!

Other problems
The Mazda is a fairly small and low car. But because of its wide doors I find it easier to get into than my Celica (in fact, that applies to all Mazdas I've ever been in).

Its size does cause problems in these areas, however:

	It can be quite hard to find in car parks, because it can hide behind almost any other car!
	Other road users don't see me coming as much as they used to in my previous, larger, cars. Luckily, a bit of defensive driving, and the much better brakes compensate. And the horn's nice and loud.
	I can't see over/through the car in front so much these days, so I find myself driving further to the right than I used to, in order to be able to see what's going on further up the road.

31 March 2001