Ford and Mazda reply

Both Ford and Mazda noticed small discrepancies in the research. Ford said sport seats, sports suspension and a leather steering wheel were missing from the comparison with Denmark; Mazda said the seat-height adjustment found on UK cars was missing.

Jato replied: 'Our specification data is the most comprehensive available and will typically contain approximately 1500 items per vehicle. Jato's data is used by the majority of motor manufacturers around the world.

'For the purposes of this study, we felt that it was important to rationalise the quantity of data used in order to make the information easy to digest. For that reason we only included core items which we expected to differ between the UK and other international markets and chose not to include every possible item.'