

I have not put a penny on my car in almost a year, the tranny is automatic with the manual shift option, and I have fun with the car with no issues.Īs with ANY car, maintenance is key, and if you are unlucky enough to buy an unmaintained car, you will pay the price for it.Īlso, brakes, rims, tires are just wear & tear, not issues with a car.Īlways do as much research as possible before buying a used car. My brother in law has a 2004 Mazda 3 GT, a good friend has a 2002 Protege 5 2002, and everyone is happy with their cars. I own a 2003 Protege 5 in Montreal, so it suffers terrible winters & cold, which is considered heavy use by Mazda. Does anybody out there own a Speed 3 hatch? Due to the limited production numbers, there is no way that I can test drive a new one and I haven't been able to find a used one for sale. I have enjoyed the car so much that I plan to order a new Mazdaspeed 3 hatch this fall. But I'm not going to complain about it too much cause if I drive carefully, I can get 39MPG out of it, which compared to any other car (except the new hybrids) that can get that kind of mileage, the P5's 2.0 has a lot more power. My other complaint is that I wish it had a little more power. This helped the road noise a little, I plan to also line the inside of the door panels with sound deadening mats in hopes of lessening it a little more. I bought a couple cans of spray on under rubberized undercoating and coated everything that I could underneath. As mentioned in previous posts, road noise is a little excessive. I have only two complaints about the car though. I have not had any problems with it, but I have also been religious with maintaining it. I bought my 2002 P5 with 62K and now have 87K on it. I just wanted to throw in my two cents about my P5. either way, I encourage you to rethink your evaluation of the Protege because nothing you've experienced, except for the water pump, is out of the ordinary for today's cars. Perhaps you've owned more reliable cars in the past. This is highly unusual, and I've not had to replace mine even after 95K miles.

The only notable issue that you have with your Mazda is having to replace your water pump. It's a nuisance, and as it's fairly cheap to fix anyway. It's an unfortunate design problem, but not one that effects safety or drivability. When you mention "front links" I assume you mean the same front swaybar links that I've had to replace. Spark plugs are cheap, and are not to be considered a reliability-related issue unless you have to replace them unusually frequently. I replace mine every 30K miles, but certain driving styles require more frequent replacement. I happen to have been lucky with my exceptionally long-lived battery, but it's not at all unreasonable to have to replace a battery every few years. Infrequent driving and short trips destroy batteries.

EGR valves are sensitive pieces of equipment they fail even more frequently on more sophisticated and expensive cars. Respectfully, allow me to comment on some of your issues.Īs a fan of Mazdas, and not for silly reasons like cult-fellowship, I think some of your problems aren't to be interpreted as unreliability on Mazda's part.
