oops....
look what I started by joyfully trolling (in humor) the Kimber guys and I say in humor because I would take one and/or buy one if there was a good deal. I have so many brands and I have never kicked one out of the house. I have favorites for collection and I have some that I prefer in use.
I take a shot at Mazda's paint every chance I get, but it has no impact on me buying or keeping a Mazda. It is sufficient and does a decent job, but if by some remote chance like winning the big lottery some guy at Mazda corporate took offense at my constant snarky jabs at their paint and did something......well then......I would be just that much more pleased with Mazda. By the way our new Honda has much better paint on it than previous Honda's that we have owned so it seems like they bumped it up a notch or two. Not German paint quality, but still pretty decent.
I do occasional cycling reviews on my blog and on some forums. On a particular cycling product coming to market they made claim of it being "gold standard". I among a number of others paid over $1K and then when we began to see the resulting data from it we realized quickly it was not even close to Gold Standard. Being that there were a bunch of us pissed we made it well known on forums and I began to show the faulty data as tested on my blog. It went on for a number of weeks on a forum where this manufacturer was advertising and continuing to defend the Gold Standard slogan. Now you have hundreds of potential buyers seeing this publicized and getting cold feet by forum and blog review posts. The owner of the company was livid as he posted a rant on my blog in response and other places about the less than accurate data from this product. Guess what happened? He reluctantly got his team to work on and release some firmware updates that got the product much closer to the accuracy we expected when we shelled out $1K for what we expected to be true. What I find is if you say nothing and go on they will take your money and never improve their products if they do not have other competitors to push them to make changes.
So I am going to make comments about the paint (and potentially other things), but not because I am angry with Mazda. I would like to see them improve. Others are going to make comments about diesels or cylinder deactivation or other things. And why not? Sometimes we, as a collective voice, can make a difference and get a product that we like get the improvements that we want. It may be rare, but sometimes manufactures listen to customers. Like Garmin usually doesn't give a crap what anyone says. They have so much of the market that they rarely address the issues. I think Garmin is like, "you will buy our product because what choice do you have?" Kind of like cable TV has that attitude even as they are losing tons of customers to streaming they remain absolutely prideful and stubborn about charging $300 a month for cable TV. (edit: good grief I almost forgot that about 25+ years ago cable TV was FREE)
Overall I am very content with my CX-5 that I bought in 2013 with now 80K mileage. I plan to keep it another 2 years and keep banking money. So far no mechanical issues and it has been very dependable.
Cmon Mazda......Give me some German level paint. Had to end this long winded ramble with that