Sunday, December 8, 2013

My Mazda 3 Experience Was Not So "Zoom... Zoom"


         
My Mazda 3




         After driving my 1992 Toyota pickup truck for 5 years, buying my older brothers 2006 Mazda 3 hatchback sounded like a dream come true. At the time, the car had low miles on it (56,000 miles), so it drove like a new car, and it was a luxurious ride! Right after I purchased the Mazda 3 from my older brother, I added an Injen cold air intake, which made the car sound like it was turbo-charged. Overall, I was very happy with my Mazda 3 and for the first 6 months the Mazda 3 was a pleasure to drive.
first road-trip with Anna


         My Mazda 3 only pushed 165 horsepower, but that didn’t stop people from constantly wanting to race me at stoplights. I won a few street races in the little Mazda 3, which felt like I was racing around in a high-end go-cart. After the first 6 months of owning the Mazda 3 I started dealing with overwhelmingly expensive repairs. The first repair I dealt with was the headlight ballast for the Xenon HID headlights, which came stock on the car. The Xenon headlights that Mazda used are prone to having issues, and my Mazda was no exception. Also, in order to fix anything on the Mazda’s headlights, you have to remove the front bumper and pull the headlights completely out before you can troubleshoot the problem. I found this out by taking my Mazda 3 to the dealership in hopes that they could diagnose the issue for me and then I would fix it at home. The dealership wanted $180 to diagnose the issue with my headlights, because it is labor intensive to get to the headlights. On top of the costs for labor, Xenon headlight parts are also very expensive. After I figured out how to take apart the front end of the car, I was able to replace the bulbs and the issue was solved for about a month. After extensive research on forums I found that the issue was the ballast. I purchased the expensive part and spent 3 more hours taking apart the front end so I could replace it.
One of he many times I had to remove the front bumper


         A few months after the headlight debacle, the Air Conditioning Compressor decided to burn its clutch. I spent about a week researching what would be required to repair it. In my research, I found that once the compressor’s clutch burns up it sends small shards of metal throughout the air conditioning system and destroys everything. To repair my air conditioner I would have to replace every part, and the cost for parts alone was well over a thousand dollars. When I called mechanics for quotes, they all quoted well over what it would cost to repair the system in other cars. They over quoted me on price because fixing the air conditioning system on a Mazda 3 was too labor intensive, and they wanted more money if they were going to do it. After 2 years of owning a Mazda 3, I put well over thirty thousand miles on it, and the transmission started having issues. I eventually found that a few of the engine mounts had broken, and this caused the transmission to shift out of alignment. With the transmission being out of alignment with the engine it destroyed the third gear synchro in the transmission. If I had repaired the third gear synchro at this point I would have been paying more than the car was worth. After driving the car without a third gear for another year, I was able to pay it down enough to trade it in for my Acura TL.

Saying goodbye to the Mazda 3


         I’m not sure if I just had bad luck with my Mazda 3, but I was very disappointed in the quality of the parts that were used to build it. Also, all the parts that had issues were very expensive to replace. The majority of the time I owned the car I felt like Mazda was targeting me; I felt like there was someone high up somewhere laughing at my misfortunes I had with the money pit I was driving around. This made me very biased towards Mazda, and I will never buy another Mazda again.