The manufacturing and finishing (honing) of cylinder liners for the automotive industry is a constant challenge in order to reduce friction losses and oil consumption. A better knowledge of surfaces generated during plateau honing is then required for optimization of the process. Despite a well-known and controlled honing process, variations in surface roughness appear at both global (due to honing tool wear) and local (TDC, middle stroke, BDC) scales and need to be mapped and analysed. The following paper proposes to map the global and local variations in roughness by using a confocal 3D measuring equipment able to measure and scan any area of a cylinder liner. Six motor blocks (five liners each) are evaluated with twenty topography measurements per liner. In total, six hundred 3D measurements of size 1×1 mm are performed and roughness parameters are computed. The results show that some parameters do correlate with the honing tool wear specific to each cylinder. Experimental models could be built. Furthermore surface roughness varies significantly over the axial length of the liners due to waviness deviations combined with a lack of flexibility of the honing tool in axial direction. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.