But (presumably) the MJ costs less to run due to higher MPG, therefore apart from the initial higher purchase cost they cost less to run on a daily basis. Oil changes are hardly worthy of mention as even the MJ only usually requires an oil change once per year.
Having said that, I understand MJs suffer if only ever driven around town, they do need a good hard drive occassionally.
Getting fleet-wide real world comparisons from fuelly isn't that easy, in part because there aren't that many diesels (and almost all of them are the 75HP MJ1's). Also, diesels would logically be bought by folks doing longer journeys, which in itself boosts mpg - if those motorway folks had all bought petrol cars, they'd likely have done better that the average for the city-driven ones.
That said, and with a typical driver in mind, a quick look suggests the fleet averages are 45mpg petrol, 53mpg diesel, which sounds about right, so let's work with that. At current UK prices, those figures give the diesel a fuel cost advantage of about £150 over 10,000 miles.
There aren't enough MJ2's on fuelly to get any meaningful insight into economy, but with 95HP against 69HP, it wouldn't really be a fair comparison anyway. I'd be surprised if the 95HP Mjet could better the 1.2 in typical use, but to be fair, they're cars for a different mission.
There are certainly higher long-term mechanical risks in running a DPF-equipped diesel (a set of injectors cost someone on the Panda forum not far short of £2000; they were told that failure at 75000 miles is not unusual & FIAT regard them as consumable items).
Based on my own experience (20,000 miles in a 1.2 returning a tad over 60mpg overall), I'd agree with the forum sentiment that if you drive for best economy, the 1.2 will have the lowest direct running cost of any 500.
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