jrkitching's explanation sums up pretty much in entirety why we now no longer a 500. Having owned two, a 2011 (built 2010) 1.2 and a 2013 (built 2012) TA, we've had enough experience of some of the common faults the 500 is known to have. We escaped the boot hatch wiring issues because we got rid of both cars almost out of warranty and that issue never arose.
It's such a shame because the 500 is an eye catcher, just poorly built in my opinion in some areas and when you couple that with putting service items like pollen filters in the most ridiculously inaccessible places, then it's no wonder some of us got fed up. The door handle issues are just a poor joke
As for the competition out there, well obviously I'm going to big up the new i10 as we now own one in 1.2 Premium guise. Ok, as I said before, it doesn't have the cutsey looks, but for us it is a far more useable car, four doors with solidly built/attached door handles! a whisper quiet engine, very well specced with air con, cruise control, electric windows all round, decent DRL's (if you're into that sort of thing!) excellent bluetooth/hands free connectivity and what's more, it's competitivly priced. We did particularly well getting our i10 on a good discount on Hyundai's Affinity Scheme, that with a reasonable PX price on our old TA, we just had to find £4.5k to own the car outright.
Above all, our dealer experience with Hyundai was excellent, above what our Fiat dealership experience was when we bought our TA when the sales person conveniently failed to menton to me at the point of sale that our pre-reg car was in fact already 14 months old from build date. Partly my own fault for not digging deeper. I live and learn.
I want to make it clear though, we thoroughly enjoyed many aspects of 500 ownership, we just couldn't face reliability issues later down the line and often, the necessary expense of having to fix stuff outside of warranty at our own expense and of course when it comes to stuff like broken door handle hinges, the car wouldn't pass its MOT, so you have to have those repaired for obvious safety reasons.