Well, it's gone. I took the Fabia vRS SE into the garage yesterday and picked up my nice shiny new Mazda6 Sport. I was originally intending to keep the Fabia for longer (5-6 years) but I was disappointed in it. It was my first new car and maybe my expectations were too high. Don't get me wrong, it's a great car to drive and lots of fun, but the build quality and the dealer service:thumbdown:....

My previous car was a Vauxhall Astra. Bought at two years old with 40K miles on the clock.

In 4 years and 95K miles it had the following work done (excluding reasonable wear and tear):

2 new front springs

New mass air flow sensor.

New Crankshaft sensor.

In contrast my SE in 3 years and 32K miles:

Fix for stutter.

Rear door leaks fixed (3 times and I'm still not entirely convinced).

Knocking/clonking from front suspension and/or steering ever since it was about 6 months old. Dealer's response was 'You have to expect some wear and tear especially with the state of the roads nowadays'. Finally did something at the last service, but looks like that involved packing worn components with grease rather than replacing them since the knocking came back two weeks later.

Replacement windscreen (OK, not exactly Skoda's fault, but my brother reckons that the chip that I had shouldn't have fractured necessitating the replacement - it looks like the body shell just isn't rigid enough and flexes).

Front washers packed up. This was actually a result of Autoglass replacing the windscreen and messing up the entire scuttle panel. However, the dealer's initial diagnosis was that I had used the wrong concentration of screen wash and clogged the washers (and then didn't bother actually fixing the washers). They did pick up on it on a later visit, however this probably just shows that they hadn't even bothered looking at it on the first visit.

Rear washer nozzle snapped off during cold spell last winter and needed two trips to the dealer before they 'fixed' it. It now squirts horizontally, not vertically.

I was hoping that buying a brand new car would give me at least three years of trouble free motoring and I've been sadly disappointed. The weird thing is that Skoda usually does pretty well on owner satisfaction and reliability surveys. Was I just expecting too much?

I think you were possibly expecting too much from your dealer!

Small family company or a large national company?

Not often you hear such a tale of woe from a fabia owner or a skoda owner come to that!

Hope you have better motoring with your new Mazda 6

Tbh build quality is cr4p just niggly little things where they've cut corners

Rear doors

Washer pipes

Boost hose clips

Turbo's

Stutter

Flywheels

Console bushes