@rich you say that but I got a 2L petrol with 190bhp and often get min of 43mpg in town/country roads and 50+mpg on motorway journeys. But I guess it depends on the car and how efficient it is, could be worth you test driving one and ask for up to 1hour to test it out and see what fuel economy you get from it?
What car do you have? We’ve been driving an X1 2L turbo diesel for 4½ years now and have got used to the lazy way of driving a diesel. I’ll always prefer petrol though. The Skoda 1.5L engine is turbocharged and wouldn’t need to be revved as much as the Mazda to get it moving! I doubt if the Mazda will be any quicker than the Skoda either with it being a NA engine. I run an old MX5 too so I know the engines have to be pushed on them. Looking on somewhere like honest john for real mpg the Skoda is around 4mpg better (38 vs 34). Having said that the Skoda is £1k more in AP so that difference could be spent on fuel if we do prefer the Mazda. Although the X1 does 40mpg, the extra money diesel costs probably brings it down to mid/high 30s compared to a petrol engine. Will definitely be taking both for a test drive though before deciding.
Rich – Between my wife and I we have had around a dozen diesels (mostly BMW’s and VW’s), but now that we are retired and our mileage is down to only around 12,000 miles a year we decided to go for the refinement of a petrol. We are over a year into a BMW X1 2.0i 4WD Auto and are actually getting slightly better mpg than you are getting from your diesel X1 and around 5mpg better than we were getting from our previous VW Tiguan 2.0D 4WD Auto. Running costs weren’t a major factor for us, but the better mpg has been a pleasant surprise (as has the 600 mile range) and of course we hadn’t predicted that petrol would be 20p a litre cheaper than diesel (as it is around here now). As well as better mpg, the petrol BMW performs significantly better than the VW diesel in every respect and is whisper quiet. I haven’t driven a Mazda CX-5 to know how that compares, but a good 2.0i petrol engine provides effortless driving and therefore can result in surprisingly low running costs.