My 2014 Mazda 3 has fairly regular infotainment issues, audio playing on my phone but no audio from the speakers, resolved by rebooting it.

Also had an issue with the backup camera cutting out. Was caused by a loose connector. Dealership was unwilling to help for free so I just cleaned the contacts and reseated the connector myself. Months later I received a recall notice with no fix available, still more months later hey finally said there was a repair but I haven’t brought it in yet.

All that said I’m still happy with the car despite these imperfections and will keep driving it until the wheels fall off, and wouldn’t have any reservations about buying a new one.

Maybe they are better now, but I had two Mazdas between about 2005 and 2015. They were fine for the most part, but their frames rusted out and had to be scrapped well before the rest of the car was worn out. They're not really suitable for long-term use in the midwestern/northeast US salt belt unless you're a high-roller who only leases cars.

Mazda is responsible for one of the biggest reliability cock-ups in modern automotive history. A lot of Americans are not aware of this because this generation of diesel motor didn't make it to the American market but for many years they sold cars with a diesel engine with multiple critical manufacturing and design issues that resulted in thousands and thousands of defective engines. In many markets this was never recalled and at least in some markets Mazda's response was to draw another line higher up on diesel dipsticks so the owner could monitor if their crankcase was filling up with diesel, which would eventually dilute the engine oil and destroy the turbo and other components.

In my country used car dealers will not touch Mazda diesels for trade-ins because they always come back to them with destroyed engines.

I had a sub 5sec 0-60 Miata set up for the track and I gotta tell you that I can whip our Prius much more than I thought was possible. Camry is a barge though.

Yessss. Happy to hear this. A Miata has been on the wishlist for a while now.

From what I know, Mazdas are the most European Japanese cars: more fun and less reliable. I was considering an MX-5 / Miata once, and... they rust quickly (maybe the current model doesn't).

What's your beef with CVT, especially with Toyota's planetary gear? The latter is probably the greatest development in transmission in the last 50+ years.

The Corolla I was driving recently can definitely not be recommended. It was a rental.

Was a Hybrid, though that shouldn't affect this. It wouldn't save most of the settings I changed. Apparently you can either save it "to the key" (I googled how to do it, didn't work) or to your "profile" with a mobile app. I would never want to have to use my mobile to save car settings, even if I owned it, let alone a rental.

It has a feature that scans road signs and displays them on the dash. Awesome feature, which I've had in other cars before. Just in case you missed one and usually more accurate than Google maps for dynamic situations like construction zones. Unfortunately it loudly beeps and blinks at you if you happen to go over the limit or god forbid set the cruise control above the limit. This can be disabled individually but is part of the settings that don't save across car shutdowns.

Why is that an issue? Because setting the cruise control to 50 when in a 50km/h zone will have you driving 45 in reality as evidenced by speed measuring displays I drove by. At 100km/h you'll probably be going 90. I learned the 6 key presses on the steering wheel to disable this after starting the car real fast. Unfortunately it disables the entire feature (else it'd be a lot more key presses and I ain't doing that). If this wasn't a rental but a purchase I'd be in this guys boat and trying to return the car.

This is just one example. The other more dire one is the cruise control. I've mentioned it elsewhere before and this Corolla isn't the only one, but the automatic breaking in these cars nowadays is dangerous. The amount of time I was sitting in the car with my foot right above the accelerator in case I need to power through an automatic breaking situation was unreal.

So glad to have been back home after vacation, driving my Subaru (with an adaptive cruise control that does not have this issue).

Yeah, we have an Outback as well (2017) and it, too, left us "stranded" (it was parked at home but failed when we really needed it) due to probably the same thing ? Ours drained the battery dead both times. We brought it in both times and had them look it over, both times they blamed us, saying we left a light on (we didn't). Then my wife remembered a recall notice concerning the electrical system, and suddenly they were able to fix the issue. Really put a dent in my trust with them.

Great car otherwise. Well, the CVT isn't the best for driving. But the AWD and agility and snow handling is fantastic.

If you have a problem they take 4 weeks to fix it all while you're paying $50+/day for a rental car that they will fight you tooth and nail on reimbursing.

One local dealer refused to honor under warranty the work another dealer did.

If you have any damage (even minor cosmetic) they will blame that on your issues regardless of relativity.

(I have a Hyundai that's had the ICCU replaced once, the ABS IEB twice, and the low-voltage battery 3 times, two of the 3 times on my dime. All on a less than 3-year-old car with less than 100k miles)

The company has been miserable to deal with compared to my past experiences with other brands.

Honorable mention - Hyundai Kona EV managed to build a reduction gear that blows around 100k km - just after warranty ends and they specifically recommend not changing the gear oil.

I recently got rid of a 2016 Kia Sonata with a severe (and getting worse) oil burning issue. It was well under 100k miles. We really liked the car otherwise overall. Great price, seemed to be made well, easy to work on. The extended warranty on these only applies if you actually blow up engine, which I wasn't willing to do deliberately because I have scruples.

(And according to forum threads, at the time this happened to this us, stealerships were putting people on a 1-2 year waitlist for remanufactured engines, or straight-up totalling their vehicles and giving them "market value" for the car, and these models had awful resale value exactly due to these problems.)

Consumer Reports currently has Audi and BMW ahead of any American manufacturer.

Brand average reliability is tricky though, on their 100-point scale, their top manufacturer (Subaru) has models that range from 38-98.

Looking at the model breakdown... I kinda suspect they don’t really have enough datapoints - VW’s reliability only includes 3 models (the Tiguan, ID.4 and TAOS) - Ford has a 25-point difference between the Escape and Maverick hybrids that share the same engine/powertrain (I can’t think of any reason why the Maverick would actually be notably more reliable than the Escape unless the PHEV escape is dragging down weighted reliability by that much over the mild hybrid), etc.

"European" cars are not really a category. French/Italian/Spanish cars are very different from German/Volvo, and even these groupings are a stretch. Then you have Dacia too, and I have no idea where to even put it. Plus you have some luxury British cars, which are again veery different.

In-group std is greater than between-group std.

Pretty good case for why Consumer Reports is not very useful anymore https://youtu.be/WicesuUvTXo

The relative ranking may hold, but the problem nowadays is all cars are unreliable due to software. Sure a car letting you down because the engine is blown up is bad, but a car failing unpredictably in the middle of nowhere due to software issue a pretty serious issue to. I’m not sure Japanese are better on this.

The EVs (from any mainstream manufacturer that began with ICE products) are all fairly immature. My AMG E53 (cabriolet) is a hybrid, and I can tolerate that. It gives me an extra 100+HP when I punch it, but I wonder how long the battery is going to last. The electric power plant adds more than 500lbs to the car, but the car still performs very well. (The car is five years old now.) I like that I can drive over 400 miles on a tank of gas, and I like that I have no trouble finding a gas station, and that it takes only a few minutes to fill the tank.

I'm looking forward to the time when an EV can give me all of these things, and I'll eagerly purchase one when that happens.

I bought this car after owning a high-end BMW. I was looking for a car that performs well, but is very reliable.

It has been a great car, and it cost only 66% of the price that Vicken paid for his Volvo EX90.

For those of us who do not want a car more expensive than our house, is Mercedes an option?

I was a bit surprised to see the the "software" criteria in your reply, as I'd always thought of enshittification's inevitability as a capitalist phenomenon whereby a quality brand is wrung out for near term gains by management incentivized to get their cut before riding off into the sunset.

But after reading up a bit, I've found that software platform lock-in was important in enshittification's original formulation — it's not just that quality goes to crap, but that users have nowhere else to go.