A couple of weekends ago, I saw one, and it just looked… wrong.
Even if I ignored the bad condition of its body panels and paint, it just looked “wrong” for that type of small roadster to be lifted.
You are the only person I have ever heard call The Mazda Miata MX-5 a beater .
It’s more of a generic term… And you probably should never watch many of the Motor Trend shows then… And I’m sure the one VDC mentioned (the bad condition of its body panels and paint) would be concerted a “beater”… I don’t think too many people take prestige Miata’s and put lift kits on them, you would use a beater that doesn’t matter if it gets a few dents in it…
And yes there is a pretty big following for lifting old Miata’s lol…
A poster in another thread suggests there’s a fuel-injector o-ring problem, leaks gasoline onto the surface of the engine. .
This one looks nice.
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A few reasons we don’t get many Miata problems here:
They’re reliable, 5/5 for most all years on CR
They don’t sell a lot, not as many people with problems, regardless
Their owners are often ‘car nuts’, likely over-maintaining them
They are (your favorite, George) pretty simple.
That lifted Miata does not look nice .
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Well they sold fewer than half a million cars for all years they were in production, so me thinks that would be a key issue to fewer complaints. Not like they were catching on fire all the time.
Looks like it has had a body kit put on it, look at the high fender flares on the quarter and fender and the wheel wells look opened up for the tire clearance… If so, there is no telling what body work was done beforehand… But agreed that looks better then what you would probably see out in the dirt… lol
A Fiat 500 even wirh every option available, is still a very rudimentary car.
I had a college roommate who bought a true Mazda Miata beater! He bought it based on the initial looks. It looked good at a distance but then you could tell paint colors didn’t match and body panels didn’t line up exactly right. It was obvious it had been in a wreck.
It was also burning lots of oil and he was more concerned about looks than basic maintenance. One day he went to start it in the morning and it would crank but real slowly and like there was a lot of resistance. Another roommate checked the oil and found none on the stick. They basically added the full specified fill of oil to the engine so it was essentially out of oil. The engine started and sounded terrible for a minute, then smoothed out. There was also some smoke at this time.
You would have thought he would have been better about checking the oil after this but ran it out of oil to where it started to lock up at least once more. Luckily that was at a Wal-Mart so he went inside and bought oil. I think after that he carried oil with him and added it basically on a daily basis. He traded the car soon after for something far more boring but new and reliable once he graduated.
The car leaked water pretty bad and always stunk inside, likely due to the wreck and poor quality repair. It sat outside in the rain for several days once and there were actual mushrooms growing inside the car!
One benefit of the car, no matter how bad, was that it seemed he had the ability to bring home any woman he wanted for the night because they were attracted to his Miata. It didn’t matter that it stunk, had been crashed and repaired, and burned tons of oil. Women flocked to him in his little red sports car. We always joked that if the engine locked up or blew up, he could just have it towed to a parking space outside of the bar of his choice and that this “beater” would still attract women.
Of course this was a bad example of an otherwise good car. It had lived a rough life and the new owner didn’t keep up with basic maintenance either. I have always though of Mazdas as a pretty good car and this situation was no fault of it being a Mazda. No matter how you slice it, this one definitely qualified for true beater status!
Yeah, for sure that one was a “beater”. There must have been a Miata meet-up in the area that day because there was a fairly long caravan of Miatas, all apparently heading to the same place. Most of them looked showroom-new, and the lifted one stood out for both the poor condition of the body panels/paint, and because the proportions were just… very strange… when it was lifed.
It looked almost as strange as Suzuki’s very weird X-90 from the 1990s.
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Maybe someone put a Miata body on top of a 4x4 frame so they could register it with the Miata VIN. It’s certainly a light body.
And, re @bing comment, Mazda has built a bit over 1 million Miatas over the years since 1989.
I looked at the figures for imported into the us. You don’t see many Morris minor complaints either. I forget they’re U.S. figures but under 10,000 mainly on the east and west coasts. I realize mine was abused though so doesn’t count.
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That would have been my answer !! After all anyone can take the most reliable car in history and quickly turn it into a POS with very little effort.
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Or visa versa. I got my olds diesel up to 480,000 mile through sheer orneriness. Not to mention buckets of cash.
99% of the repairs I perform have nothing to do with maintenance.
Yesterday a 2011 Lexus LS460 was dispatched to me with a complaint of “Steering wheel vibrates after switching off engine”.
Cause: Power tilt steering motor gear failed, tilt wheel stuck in full raised position. Replacement steering column is $2200.
Complete vehicle inspection found torn control arm bushings, leaking shock absorbers, worn brake pads and failed hood supports. Repair estimate of more than $10,000. 68,000 miles. More frequent oil changes would not have prevented this.
Granted, the car was 12-years old, but that many major problems? If I was in the market for a Lexus, this would scare me off… See my posting #23 above ('85 Toyota Corolla…).
From @Nevada_545’s description of the problems it seems like someone was playing Dukes of Hazard with the Lexus.
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There is a guy in my town who collects the GM diesels and has like 3 or 4 of them. Basically he was given the first one by his grandma on his 16th birthday with a blown head gasket. He fixed it and studded the block or whatever the fix is for the weak and poorly spaced head bolts. Apparently later versions of the engine had many of the defects fixed and weren’t a bad engine besides being low on power but the PR damage had been done and GM gave up on the idea.
I also read up on this and some folks opted for a gas engine as a replacement because of all the trouble they had. The guy I know of works at an auto body shop and drives one about 60 miles each day. He says acceleration is terrible but the thing gets like 40mpg, even with that old technology.
Another funny story he had was driving around town in a “grandma car” and getting smoked by one of those jacked up coal rolling trucks. He caught up to the guy, put the engine in neutral, and just floored it. Apparently these things can roll coal with the best of them and the guy in the truck looked shocked and was wondering what was going on.