Best Generation Miata – What Year MX5 To Buy

This post is inspired by a question we got on our Facebook page asking what the best generation Miata to buy is, or if there were any years to avoid.

First things first: this is not going to be yet another article filled with tidbits like “you should avoid 1990 Miatas because of the short-nose crankshaft“. There are a million of those articles already out there, and ultimately none of them matter at this point.

A 1990 Miata is over 30 years old. Who cares if SNCs (that’s how the cool kids abbreviate Short-Nose Crankshafts) were a problem? By now the car has likely had the problem addressed, or it isn’t affected by those failures.

Obviously it’s still a good idea to do your research on any car you are buying, but rather than re-iterate what has been said a million times over on other websites, this article will focus on the state of the used Miata market in the year 2024

All Miata generations are great in their own ways. There’s not a particular “bad” Miata year or generation, but there are “bad” Miatas out there. Those are the cars with bad accident history, cars with previous owners who didn’t follow the maintenance schedule, or cars with too much rust.

But enough about the bad – let’s talk about the good deals out there, and the best driving experiences that your dollar can get you.

Best Value Miata – NB

In my opinion, there’s no better value for your money these days than the NB Miata.

When you’re talking about the driving experience, NA and NB Miatas are often lumped together. And there’s a good reason for that, they are very similar cars and offer very similar raw driving experiences.

However, if you’ve been tracking Miata prices lately, you may have noticed that NAs have started to get pricey. We’re not just talking about low-mile collector spec cars – prices of ALL NAs have gone up in recent years. Call it the “pop-up headlight tax” if you want.

Pop-up headlights are cool, and the heart wants what it wants. If you’re dead-set on having pop-up headlights, no words I can write here will fill the round H6024 sized hole in your heart.

But if we are talking pure driving experience – the NB is an improved iteration of the NA in almost every way. It’s a similar size, similar weight car. You won’t think of it as “bigger” in the way that an NC is.

At the same time, it has a more powerful engine (in particular if you get an NB2), a much better (firmer) chassis, larger brakes… the list goes on. In essence, if you were to buy a bone-stock NA Miata and perform a bunch of “OEM+” style modifications to it – mods that improved the overall performance without changing or compromising the feel of the car – you’d end up with an NB.

While the NA is a more simple, old-school car, sometimes technology brings with it some quality-of-life improvements. For example: if you buy an NB Miata you won’t ever have to deal with OBD1 troubleshooting when you get a check engine light. While it’s neat to point at a paper clip and say you used it to diagnose your car, OBD2 code readers have made it much easier to diagnose problems.

Another example – safety. NBs aren’t going to be toppling Volvos as some shining beacon of safety, but having multiple airbags and ABS as standard options is very nice to have.

The fact that you can get all of those improvements at similar, and in some cases, cheaper prices than an NA makes this a no-brainer. The best cheap Miata in 2024 is an NB.