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Mazda MX-5 NA 1.6
Looking at an MX-5 for sale?
Put in the asking price and the odometer reading. You will see what this model should make at that reading.
Odometer only. Colour, options, history, condition and the photographs move it further, and that is what the report reads.
Price history
The verdict
Recorded sales
Every row, with its price and note (4) ↓
Score breakdown
The working behind each factor: baseline and drivers ↓
What it costs to own · about 5,143 km a year
Specification
What moves the price on this model
Condition, history, originality, ownership, delivery and modification multipliers apply to every car in the library. They are applied automatically when an advertisement is analysed, and the schedule is set out once, on the analyser page.
Projected value in five years
The case for and against
The original car and the one the legend is built on: 955 kilograms, a 1.6 that wants revs, and pop-up headlights. Australian-delivered cars with a hardtop and paperwork are a thinning population and the three results here show the market already separating them from imports.
236,000 built and 4,200 delivered here, so the pool is not small. Rust decides everything, the 1.6 gives away real pace to the 1.8, and a Japanese import at no reserve made $9,300 in 2025.
Known faults and risks
Similar cars, and what they cost to run
The MX-5 NA entry describes the NA8 - the 1.8-litre car built from 1994 - and four of the six Australian results filed against it are 1.6-litre NA6 cars from 1989 to 1992. They are a different engine, a different chassis code and a materially different price.
Read the rest of the evidence notes (4 more)
$17,100 at 119,808 kilometres from Townsville, Queensland in December 2022, an Australian-delivered car with its third owner for 22 years, highly original, with the factory hardtop and a service trail back to 1997; $14,100 at approximately 300,000 kilometres from Lane Cove North, New South Wales in December 2025, Australian-delivered, in one family for 30 years, hardtop, with a fresh timing belt; and $9,300 at 129,357 kilometres from Soldiers Hill, Victoria in July 2025, a Japanese import sold at no reserve.
It sat at mid-pack kilometres and made 46 per cent less than the Townsville car, which had 9,500 kilometres fewer. What separates them is Australian delivery, the hardtop, the ownership length and the paperwork.
Across the two Australian-delivered cars - 119,808 kilometres at $17,100 and 300,000 at $14,100 - the slope is about 1.1 per cent per 10,000 kilometres, and that is all three points can support. Adding the import inverts the sign, which is a fact about its market position rather than about kilometres.
A 1990 1.6 rebuilt by MX5 Mania in 2020 with a replacement turbocharged engine, an NB8C six-speed, a Torsen 2 differential, Wilwood front brakes, coilovers, a full respray and body-wide paint protection film, making 165kW against the 86kW it left the factory with. It is the most expensive MX-5 in this library's record and it is not this car. It is also the clearest measurement available of what a documented professional build is worth on a cheap Japanese platform. SOURCING: all four read from the Collecting Cars lot pages themselves, which is why the ownership, hardtop and modification detail above exists.
The report prices the car in the advertisement.
Send the link. A person reads the advertisement and its photographs and sends back what that Mazda MX-5 NA 1.6 is worth, what to offer and when to walk away, with five years of costs at the distance you drive.
The evidence on this model is thin and the report says so on its cover. Read a complete one on a real car first. Seventeen sections, no account, nothing to pay.
One line of email when this desk publishes a call on a Mazda MX-5 NA 1.6, or records a new Australian sale of one. Nothing else, no schedule, and on a quiet model you may hear nothing for months, which is itself worth knowing about a car you are chasing.