FAQs

New to working on cars, or just new to Miatas? This page should help answer questions you might have on owning, maintaining, and fixing these classic roadsters!

Are Miatas easy to work on?

Yes, Miatas are very easy cars to work on. They are a great “beginner” vehicle if you are just starting to learn how to DIY repairs.

Mazdas, like most other Japanese manufacturers, do not require a lot of specialized tools. People joke that Miata can be disassembled and reassembled with a 10 mm socket, and that isn’t too far from the truth! Check out our Tool Recommendations and you’ll see that you really don’t need all that much to get started performing your own repairs.

What generation of Miata is most reliable?

This is difficult to answer! It is hard to go wrong with any generation of Miata, and they are all pretty reliable compared to most other cars on the road. But some things to keep in mind when considering your choice:

• Older cars generally have more “old car problems”. Over time, rubber (found in hoses, gaskets, bushings, etc.) degrades, and plastics (found in interiors, radiators, electrical connectors, etc.) get brittle. Many of these are age-related problems, not mileage-related problems.
• When you’re buying a used car, particularly a 20+ year old car like an NA or NB Miata, the previous owner makes the biggest impact when it comes to reliability. The most reliable Miata will almost always be the one with a fat stack of receipts proving it was well taken-care of by the previous owner.

Should I buy a Miata that needs paint / body work?

Generally speaking, it’s not recommended. Of course, I got into this Classic Rust project so I didn’t follow my own advice here. Do as I say, not as I do!

If you are new to automotive work, you might be surprised how expensive body work is. For example, say you are looking at 2 Miatas.

Miata #1 has good paint, but the brakes are horrible, the shocks are worn out, and it leaks some oil. Miata #2 runs and drive perfect, but the front bumper is not the same color as the rest of the car.

You might think that the second car is much easier and simple to get sorted – it’s just painting a bumper! But enough experience has taught me that sorting out the first car will be easier.

Miata parts are affordable – some brakes, shocks, and gaskets will only cost a few hundred dollars and a few hours in the garage. Meanwhile, getting a single panel, like the front bumper sprayed by a body shop, will also cost you a few hundred dollars, and that’s assuming you do the back-breaking prep work yourself!

Now you might be thinking “Both of those scenarios involve a few hundred dollars and a few hours of work, so what’s the big deal?”. The trouble is, it’s really hard to paint just one panel on an older car. The new panel will look freshly painted, while the rest of the car will have paint that is less-than-fresh after ~20 years of exposure to the outdoor elements.

Many body shops will try to “blend” the new paint in with the old paint by also painting some of the adjacent panels. Even assuming that you trust the shop to do this work well, the scope of your project has now expanded beyond “just painting a bumper” to also painting fenders and a hood. Now things have gotten a lot more expensive, and you still have to cross your fingers that they do a good job and get you a decent result. Trust me, changing out some brakes and shocks is a lot more simple!

What are “DIY Savings”?

DIY Savings are the approximate amount of money you save by performing a repair yourself as opposed to taking your car to a mechanic.

This is an important number to think about when deciding whether to do a job yourself or pay someone to do it for you. For example, maybe you want to change your brakes yourself, but then you realize you will need to purchase a brake compression kit. Is it worth spending $25 to buy a special tool? When the DIY Savings of changing your brakes yourself repair are $550, personally, I think that $25 is money well-spent!

How do you calculate the “DIY Savings” of a repair?

Cost of a Mechanic – Parts Cost = DIY Savings

To get our “Parts Cost” – we simply add up the cost of the parts needed for that repair at the time the guide is written. Obviously prices are subject to change over time.

For the “Average Cost of a Mechanic” – we enter in the repair we are doing for a Mazda Miata of that generation on YourMechanic’s cost estimator. We then round them to the nearest $50. We prefer to give “round” numbers as opposed to “exact” numbers because we cannot guarantee what a mechanic in your area will charge for a repair.

Labor rates vary wildly in different parts of the world, and they also change (generally increase…) over time. If you want to get the most accurate idea of what a mechanic will charge for a repair, your best bet is always going to be to pick up the phone and call local repair facilities to ask for a quote.