The fuel economy on this car is pretty good in my opinion. Its a petrol automatic and if I do half a tank of fuel on Motorways with the speedo at 80 - 85 and the rest of the tank around town I will see 40 MPG. I don;t think one can complain too much about this. If I do all short journeys and no motorway mileage I can probably get around 35, which again is pretty good.
Its not the quietest of vehicles in my opinion - I'm comparing it with a 15 year old Volvo S80 though. Basically its not too bad although you do tend to hear things being thrown up from the road a t times - a bit strange because they sound as if these things are hitting a very thin piece of metal ( I can't figure out where this might be since there seem to be fully covered in wheel arches - these sounds do not occur everyday but are strange when they do happen. However the most annoying things from a sound perspective are the roar from the twin exhaust (why do they think it is necessary to have a sporty exhaust - this is a large family saloon, not a racer) when acelerating, and also it is difficult to hear the built in satnav when cruising at motorway speeds ( 70 - 80 mph) - it seems that the satnav only 'speaks' through one speaker (the drivers door) and that it is struggling to make itself heard over the general road noise (without the radio playing).
Why doesn't this vehicle have heated front seats (they only cost a tenner or so at manufacturing time) and why doesn't it have electric front seats with memory (it is particularly annoying to have to try and reset the seat after the garage has had the car and adjusted it to their liking)! Again electric front seats don;t really cost anything much to build in.
Well on this vehicle the satnav (which is very expensive - twice the price of a top range Garmin or Tomtom) is a heap of rubbish. Firstly it did not work when delivered (the satnav did not know where the car was). It took three trips back to the garage for them to fix it and it was only on the third trip they agreed to replace the unit. Then 6 months later after I had updated the maps (not sure if this was a coincidence) it started to fail for a couple of days - would not load maps (then it fixed itslef and tha garage looked at it but didn't find anything - I got the usual "updated it to the latest level" rubbish. Then a couple of weeks later it dropped dead again - this time it would go into a loop saying "loading navigation" and then flashing up a map with no roads, and then back to the message - it would keep this up for 2 hours! The garage said there were no codes logged!!!! Really - its worse than Windows. Then the service manager pushed the factory reset button and it came back to life - they had it in for another day and again I was told it had been brought up to the latest level!!! So no faith in this at all. It also suffers from a wierd entry procedure for setting up you destination. It measures altitude in yards!!! Who on earth does this? It thinks the fastest distance is the way the crow flies so you find yourself trekking down all sorts of narrow country lanes and then having to reverse to avoid massive tractors - I kid you not. It seems to have lost a lot in the translation from the Japanese.
Why is there no spare tyre? The space saver is hideously expensive - if you don't get it you get a can of gunk which will certainly destroy your tyre meaning every puncture requires a new tyre, and it may not solve your puncture problem. In addition the spare wheel well is not large enough to accomodate a full size steel spare (in the UK this costs about ?95 including tyre and wheel). Why not - a genuine spare would cost Mazda ?50 at the very, very most and everyone one would buy it.