Japan marque
Mazda in the UK
Mazda has been imported into Britain since the late 1960s and has kept naturally aspirated petrol engines and manual gearboxes in its range longer than most. The MX-5 has been sold here since 1990 and has the strongest specialist parts supply of any modern roadster. Rear arch and sill corrosion on cars from the mid 2000s is the known weak point, and it is worth an inspection rather than an assumption.
There is no reliability figure for Mazda as a marque that this site could cite. What circulates instead is survey data from panels that select themselves, warranty claim rates published by companies with a product to sell, and averages built by choosing which years and variants to count.
Each of those choices moves the answer by several percentage points, and none of them is a measurement a reader could go and check. A number printed beside the Mazda badge here would be our arithmetic wearing somebody else's name.
What is genuinely knowable is one car at a time: its own invoices, its own service record and what the common repairs on that model actually cost when they arrive.
No fault ordering is published for this marque
Model by model
Every Mazda line we hold a record for
| Model | Years sold in the UK | Body styles | Fuel types | Fuel options |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mazda2 | since 2003 | Hatchback | Petrol, Diesel, Petrol mild hybrid | 3 |
| Mazda3 | since 2004 | Hatchback, Saloon | Petrol, Diesel, Petrol mild hybrid | 3 |
| Mazda6 | 2002 to 2023 | Saloon, Estate | Petrol, Diesel | 2 |
| CX-5 | since 2012 | SUV | Petrol, Diesel | 2 |
| CX-3 | 2015 to 2021 | SUV | Petrol, Diesel | 2 |
| MX-5 | since 1990 | Convertible, Coupé | Petrol | 1 |
Before you buy one
What the Mazda record does and does not settle
There are 6 Mazda model lines here and the oldest of them went on sale in Britain in 1990. Of those, 4 are still sold new and 2 have finished. A finished line is not automatically a worse buy, but it fixes the newest example you will ever find and it decides how long the parts supply has had to run.
Between them those models have been sold here with 3 different fuel types: petrol, diesel and petrol mild hybrid. That spread is the practical reason one figure for the whole marque would be no use to anybody standing on a forecourt. The alternative fuel discount that used to shave a little off hybrids ended on the same date, so hybrid badging no longer changes the bill. Diesels carry a particulate filter, and a car used only for short cold journeys will keep blocking it until the driving pattern changes.
Those lines were bodied 6 ways: hatchback, saloon, estate, SUV, convertible and coupé. On the convertibles, look at the roof drainage channels: blocked ones put rainwater into the footwell instead of out through the sill. The four wheel drive versions carry more driveline than the two wheel drive ones, and driveshaft boots and propshaft joints are all inspected.
Because the oldest line here reaches back to 1990, examples across this marque fall under all three road tax regimes: engine size for anything first registered before 1 March 2001, CO2 bands from then until 31 March 2017, and the flat standard rate for anything registered on or after 1 April 2017. That is why the tax figure on each model page names the year and the engine it applies to, and why it is safer to read the V5C than to take a rate from a badge.
What goes wrong on a Mazda is decided by the individual car and the person who owned it last, not by the marque. Two examples of the same model and year, one serviced on time and one not, are in completely different condition, which is the honest reason a marque average would mislead you even if somebody published one. The invoices for the car in front of you name what was actually replaced, when, and at what mileage. Read those instead.