[throwaway0a5e]

>There’s no more than 20 moving parts in the power-train, of course it’s going to be reliable.

Mazda called, they want their 1980s marketing BS back.

From a pure technical perspective, yes, less moving parts are more reliable. From the perceptive of some upper middle class consumer who has to pay some godawful price for any given part to be swapped out a simple minor oversight in the "systems that are common to all cars" portion of the system can easily make the simpler system "unreliable" in practice. Furthermore, mileage alone is not going to unlock the "inadequate design of plastic components causing failure as they get brittle" failure mode. That comes with age.

That said, you may be right. Toyota basically lied to these same demographics for 15 yr about "don't worry guys, we fixed the frames on the new ones" with no apparent reputational damage.