2.0 145ps SE-L Nav Auto 4dr Saloon

OK but not as good as I had hoped given my previous car was a 15 year old Volvo S80

First of all a few points I accepted but wasn't terribly happy about. I was forced to have blacked out windows at the rear - no option. I cannot understand why these should be standard - if people insist on reducing their visibility they can have them painted on afterwards. Second there is no spare wheel - it comes with the can of r****** that means you have to write off any tyre you might get a puncture with - it also means you have to fork out for roadside assistance just in case your tyre cannot be reinflated - this makes no sense - to did insult to injury the boot well is not even big enough to accommodate a full size spare - come on Mazda, how mcuh does it cost to do this. Thirdly the bonnet does not have any Spring assistance - it has a manual strut - this is the top of the range model Mazda - why is this missing? Fourthly ere is no option for heated front seats unless you buy the bone jarring 19 inch wheel version - how much does the heated seat pad cost at the manufacturing stage - £5, or maybe £10. The black interior is the only option unless you buy the Sport model, and shows as much dirt from shoes plus hairs etc as you would imagine.

Having got the car there are some other niggles - first the instruction manual is 720 pages, yes that's right, and at least one third of these must be health and safety warning type pages. Also it's in black and white. Just try finding what you want in this especially when it covers all variants and you have no real idea whether your car has type A dashboard or Type B, to give just one example. The SatNav, expensive as it is, is somewhat difficult to operate and seems to have a mind of its own in terms of what it will and will not accept - I put my daughters house number in but it refused to accept it even though the number I entered was one of the options it offered - eh? Despite reading the manual several times I still don't feel I have understood the operation of this device yet. The car only has a reversing light on one side, just like it only has a pull-down handle on the boot lid on one side - both a bit penny pinching. The indicator lights are very small and not at all easily seen from the outside. The exhaust note is somewhat invasive (and I'm slightly deaf) when accelerating hard. The controls for the entertainment are integrated in a screen which means that if you are using the SatNav and you want to change from Radio 2 to Radio 4 or the CD player you have to take your eyes off the road for quite a time to manipulate the screen - these functions should be controlled by knobs - yes, I know it's the fashion to have it all on your tablet, but I'm talking road safety here. The door mirrors do not fold I automatically when you exit the car, and this is a WIDE car - they should do. If you have the lights set to come on all the time (rather than using the slightly ridiculous and inadequate front only running lights) the SatNav and other displays do not auto dim at night. The A pillar and the door pillars are pretty we'd and do not help visibility. Fuel consumption is ok with around 35 mpg round town and 40 at high speed crushing on the motorways but this is not a great advance on the 15 year old Volvo which weighed 2 tons - certainly not on the motorway. The SatNav voice is most inaudible at motorway cruising speed although it is fine in town - either there is a problem with the speed sensitivity or it's an issue with the sound only coming from the driver's door speaker. Visibility out of the rear in this saloon is poor (parcel shelf is very high up, even higher than the Volvo) - if you're buying this car insist the dealer fits a reversing camera - this is a dealer fit option, despite what the brochure doesn't say, and it shouldn't cost you anything much - worth its weight in gold because this is a LONG and WIDE car.

The SatNav was the only real problem on delivery - it kept getting lost, a bad fault for a SatNav and eventually I proved it just wasn't getting enough satellites - this took three trips to the dealer to get fixed - they eventually replaced the unit.

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