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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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